Here’s the latest news on how COVID-19 is impacting Chicago and Illinois. Follow here for live updates.
State health officials Thursday said another 7,037 people in Illinois have tested positive for the coronavirus, slashing the state’s testing positivity rate to its lowest point since late October.
That positivity rate — which measures the rate of spread of the virus — now has been cut nearly in half, to 7.2%, from its most recent peak in mid-November. But it’s still higher than the summertime average positivity rate of 3.7%.
The dip was partially a result of a hefty 94,909 test results submitted to the Illinois Department of Public Health — the highest daily test count since last week.
The state this week averaged about 85,000 tests performed per day.
Reporter David Struett has the full story.
SPRINGFIELD — In early July, a judge in downstate Clay County voided Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s executive orders in a sweeping order that he applied to the entire state, at the request of a southern Illinois lawmaker who sued Pritzker over his response to the pandemic.
More than six months later, Sangamon County Judge Raylene Grischow has essentially voided Judge Michael McHaney’s July 2 order in the case of Rep. Darren Bailey, R-Xenia.
Bailey’s lawsuit against Pritzker claimed the Democratic governor had exceeded his legal authority in issuing a stay-at-home order in March to fight COVID-19.
Pritzker’s lawyers asked Grischow last month to “reconsider” the July 2 order from McHaney, who initially presided over Bailey’s case before it was transferred to Sangamon County.
Sarah Mansur at Capitol News Illinois has the full story.
1:29 p.m. Republicans block $2,000 coronavirus checks despite Trump demand
House Republicans shot down a Democratic bid on Thursday to pass President Donald Trump’s longshot, end-of-session demand for $2,000 direct payments to most Americans as he ponders whether to sign a long-overdue COVID-19 relief bill.
The made-for-TV clash came as the Democratic-controlled chamber convened for a pro forma session scheduled in anticipation of a smooth Washington landing for the massive, year-end legislative package, which folds together a $1.4 trillion governmentwide spending with the hard-fought COVID-19 package and dozens of unrelated but bipartisan bills.
Instead, Thursday’s unusual 12-minute House session instead morphed into unconvincing theater in response to Trump’s veto musings about the package, which was negotiated by Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin on Trump’s behalf. House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, the No. 2 House Democrat, sought the unanimous approval of all House members to pass the bill, but GOP leader Kevin McCarthy, who was not present in the nearly-empty chamber, denied his approval and the effort fizzled.
In March, a single case of the coronavirus in a Northwest Side school led Chicago Public Schools officials to close it.
By July, after the governor had shuttered all Illinois schools for the spring, CPS said its buildings would reopen in the fall as long as daily caseloads in the city were below 400 or test positivity was under 8% — a threshold that wasn’t met.
In November, as officials announced plans to reopen in the new year, they said the only metric stopping them would be if cases in the city started to double fewer than every 18 days.
City officials have attributed the changing thresholds to evolving science. They’ve explained that better recommendations are possible as more data becomes available and that studies have shown that schools don’t appear to be superspreaders when strict mitigation is in place.
Finally, we can say it: 2020 is almost over. Good riddance.
As we look to finally bring a close to this annus horribilis, America will be living amid the detritus for years — a devastating economic downturn, a generation of students behind in education, the collective psychic trauma of prolonged isolation. 2020 will be hard to forget.
But in 100 years, when those of us who lived through the year that everything stopped have died out, how will future generations look back on what happened? How will history be able to encapsulate just how crazy 2020 was?
We can only imagine an encyclopedia entry from 2120.
The Year 2020:
2020 was marked by a global pandemic called COVID-19, which was responsible for killing nearly 2 million people worldwide. 2020 has since been dubbed “The Lost Year,” due to nationwide shutdowns of travel, business, school and life as it was previously known.
