It's Time For Chicago's Mayor To Go It Alone On Pandemic Policy

CHICAGO — Gov. J.B. Pritzker continues to insist his benchmarks for pseudoscience metrics must be met before there's a rollback of coronavirus lockdowns, like the complete ban on indoor dining that's killing Chicago's once vibrant restaurant industry.

On Friday, Pritzker publicly denied Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot's request for the state to reconsider social-distancing restrictions set during the pandemic's early stages. The mayor called on the governor to throw dying restaurants a lifeline by allowing some indoor dining to resume, a move that a Northwestern University study shows lessens the risk of spreading of COVID-19 while helping keep the hospitality industry alive.

Pritzker stubbornly stuck to his self-spun narrative that "science" and "advice from doctors" says Chicago must first meet his pandemic statistical benchmarks — hospital capacity, people hospitalized for coronavirus and a 7-day average test positivity rate — before any rollback of coronavirus resurgence mitigations.

That argument has always been a bunch of bunk. And the governor has known it since May when the experts advising his administration told him so, according to documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act.

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Pritzker's "Epi-Modeling Task Force" issued a confidential report on May 9 that I got my hands on that says, "Changes in the total number of test-positive cases or the fraction testing positive are an unreliable measure of shifts. These numbers should not be used to determine policy." As for hospitalizations, intensive care occupancy and deaths, page 18 of the task force report says that data is collected "too late to estimate the rate of transmission in the community."

A coalition of Chicago restaurateurs obtained public health data that fails to show eateries have acted as COVID-19 outbreak hot spots. They versed themselves in a pandemic study that says limiting indoor dining to 20 percent capacity both limits the spread of coronavirus and the devastating impact of government-ordered shutdowns. And they're arguing the governor's metrics and benchmarks do not provide a measurement of protection from coronavirus spread that Pritzker claims.

"The governor's metrics are impractical, arbitrary and punitive. They don't match what we found in contact tracing data," said Roger Romanelli, coordinator for the Chicago Restaurant Coalition. "Bottom line, the governor is flat wrong, and he needs to admit it and have more faith in the restaurant industry."

Restaurateurs aren't alone. Top city sources tell me there's growing frustration that their pandemic response remains bound by the state's benchmarks on "garbage" statistics.

Pay attention to the city's pandemic updates, and you might notice that when making the case for reopening public schools and setting travel restrictions, for example, city public health commissioner Dr. Alison Arwady doesn't solely rely on the state's three key metrics to measure the risk of COVID-19 spread.

When making policy decisions, Arwady — who unlike anybody leading the state's coronavirus response, has chased pandemics around the world, MERS in Saudi Arabia, Ebola and tuberculosis in Africa, among them — also considers how many days it takes for cases to double, and the "incident rate," how many daily new cases there are per 100,000 residents.

Chicago's team of public health experts — including Illinois' former top epidemiologist Dr. Jennifer Layden, who took a pay cut at the dawn of the coronavirus crisis leaving behind a public health department run by a general practitioner and a guy with an engineering degree — have played along with Pritzker's inexplicably rigid public health response long enough.

Since Pritzker won't deviate from his months-old benchmarks, it's time for Mayor Lightfoot to go it alone on pandemic policy.

Nearly a year since COVID-19 social distance restrictions crippled Chicago's economy — the engine that overwhelmingly funds Illinois government — Illinoisans deserve a more nuanced approach to state-mandated coronavirus lockdowns that they're not abiding by anyway.

The reality is many folks in Chicago and all across the state are acting like prohibition-era boozers. They're partying in hotel rooms, pandemic speakeasies and hosting potential super-spreading dinner parties at home.

Drive around the suburbs, and you'll see restaurants (and patrons) engaging in an open rebellion against the governor's indoor dining ban, while multitudes of municipalities turn a blind eye to enforcement.

The greatest irony of Pritzker's tiered mitigations might be that the first region allowed to return to limited indoor dining as of Saturday is home to bands of restaurants that didn't abide by the governor's mandate in the first place.

Lightfoot, probably for the sake of presenting a united front in the lead up to the presidential election as COVID-19 cases spiked, has politely followed the governor's pandemic lead.

But it's time for politics to take a back seat.

Since Pritzker won't do it, the mayor needs to take charge of what's best for keeping Chicagoans healthy, both physically and economically.

She's got a capable team of public health experts armed with local pandemic data and a world-class restaurant industry committed to following safety guidelines so thousands of servers, managers and cooks can safely get back to work before their jobs disappear for good.

Our bullheaded governor and his three meaningless statistics shouldn't stand in the way.

Mark Konkol, recipient of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for local reporting, wrote and produced the Peabody Award-winning series, "Time: The Kalief Browder Story." He was a producer, writer and narrator for the "Chicagoland" docu-series on CNN, and a consulting producer on the Showtime documentary, "16 Shots."

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