Gov. J.B. Pritzker's state mask mandate ends Monday. If COVID-19 surges again, will there be the political will to bring it back?
Just shy of the second anniversary of his proclamation declaring the coronavirus a statewide disaster, Gov. J.B. Pritzker will try again to turn the page on COVID-19 restrictions Monday when he lifts his much-contested mask mandate for most indoor public places.and in places such as hospitals and day care centers, and businesses still can require them as they see fit.
People wear masks while waiting in line at the Cook County clerk's office inside the County Building on Feb. 22, 2022, as the city announced it will end its indoor mask requirement on Feb. 28. After the Illinois Supreme Court on Friday overturned a lower court order that blocked his school mask rule and the CDC came out with its new guidance, Pritzker said he would no longer require face coverings in schools beginning Monday. Most districts across Illinois had already gone mask optional or announced plans to do so next week.
But the state quickly lost ground to the virulent delta variant. By late August, Pritzker had reissued a mask mandate, and it remained in place as a late-summer wave ebbed, only to be followed this fall and winter by the state’s largest surge to date, driven by the highly contagious omicron variant. “Your best-picked metrics are still subject to the unpredictable forces that have come with each massive wave and variant,” she said.
Within 12 days, the governor banned gatherings of more than 1,000 people, closed schools, shut down restaurants and bars, and finally closed all “nonessential” businesses and enacted other restrictions through a statewide stay-at-home order that would remain in effect, with minor modifications, for more than two months.
The number of COVID-19 patients in Illinois hospitals reached an all-time high of 7,380 on Jan. 12 of this year before beginning a precipitous decline.When Pritzker announced Feb. 9 that he planned to lift the mandate at the end of the month, there 2,380 COVID-19 patients in the state’s hospitals, and the decline has continued, with 1,143 hospitalized as of Thursday night, the most recent figure available.
From the time Illinois reimposed its masking mandate Aug. 30 to the most recent figures released last week, Illinois’ hospitalization rate was among the lowest in group that included the five neighboring states, with roughly 883 of every 100,000 residents admitted to the hospital with COVID-19 during that time, according to a Tribune analysis of federal data. That was lower than rates for Indiana , Missouri and Kentucky , and roughly the same as Wisconsin’s, but not as low as Iowa’s .
In one of those factors — the level of vaccination — Illinois is also a leader, with nearly three-fourths of residents receiving at least one shot, and nearly a third receiving a booster, the latter considered the most effective way to limit the chance of an infection causing serious illness. Pritzker stopped short of ever requiring people statewide to show proof of vaccination to dine in restaurants or workout at gyms, and Chicago and Cook County are dropping their vaccine card rules on Monday along with the city and county mask mandates.
“If we have to put those mitigations back, we have to be ready to do it and do it quickly,” Murphy said. “The longer you wait, this thing can really just take over again, like it did with omicron.”
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