Illinois Governor Proposes $80 Million ‘Army’ To Track The Spread Of COVID-19
By Dave McKinney, Tony Arnold
Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker proposed a massive $80 million program Friday to hire “an army” of nearly 4,000 state workers to track anyone who came into contact with people who test positive for COVID-19.
Modeled after a similar and likely smaller program employed in Massachusetts, the so-called contact tracing program is regarded as necessary to reopen parts of
Illinois once the governor pulls back on his stay-at-home order, which began a 30-day extension on Friday.
“In order to safely move back toward normalcy, Illinois, the United States, and frankly the whole world must contact trace on a never-before-seen scale,” Pritzker said during his daily COVID-19 briefing, which has taken place for 57 straight days.
The development capped a busy day in the state’s evolving response to the coronavirus pandemic that claimed the lives of another 105 people during the past 24 hours, bringing the overall statewide death toll to 2,457.
Hundreds of protesters, many not observing social-distancing guidelines and not wearing protective face coverings, converged on the James R. Thompson Center in Chicago and the state Capitol in Springfield to rally against the governor’s newest stay-at-home order, which runs through May 30.
And late Friday afternoon, with the exponential rise of COVID cases leveling off, both Pritzker and Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot announced a further scaling back of the temporary COVID-19 field hospital at McCormick Place. Originally, the facility was designed to accommodate 3,000 beds for less seriously ill COVID-19 patients.
On Friday, a top aide to Pritzker said the facility will be downsized to only 500 beds, a more aggressive scaling back than had been announced just last Sunday. Officials had said that the McCormick Place facility would be pared back to 1,000 beds because of the state’s flattening COVID-19 curve.
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“All patients currently receiving care at McCormick will continue to receive outstanding medical care for the duration of their illness, and plans for deconstruction are currently underway,” according to a joint statement from the governor’s and mayor’s offices.
But the big news of the day was the governor shedding light for the first time on his plans for a massive contact-tracing program that would aim to begin functioning by the end of May.
Contact tracing is a practice that aims to slow the spread of highly contagious illnesses like the coronavirus by quickly notifying friends, families, co-workers and others who made contact with someone who tested positive for COVID-19. Those people then would move into a self-isolation phase, ensuring anyone who caught the virus wasn’t spreading it to others, thus hindering transmission of the illness.
On Friday, for example, there were 3,137 new COVID-19 cases. The Pritzker administration wants the state ultimately to be in the position of being able to notify multiple contacts for each new case that they, too, may be at risk of getting the virus. The state’s expected hiring binge assumes 30 new workers are needed for every 100,000 residents in the state.
“Here in Illinois, we’ve had more than 50,000 known cases to date, largely in just a 60-day time frame. Their contacts are 50,000 sets of family, friends, coworkers, commuters, classmates and other contacts. It’s an unprecedented public health challenge so we need an unprecedented solution to meet this moment,” Pritzker said.
“To do that, Illinois will be building on our existing infrastructure and expertise to shape a massive statewide contact-tracing operation, gradually building over the coming weeks and then scaling up an army of contact tracers by the hundreds and then by the thousands,” Pritzker said.
The announcement came as protesters were rallying outside the Thompson Center against the governor’s plans to extend the stay-at-home order for a second time.
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