The indoor dining ban that Gov. J.B. Pritzker set will likely be on the table for weeks.
Pritzker made the call as a “resurgence mitigation” effort in response to the increasing COVID-19 hospitalizations and positivity rates in Chicago and other parts of Illinois.
The governor said that he expects the mitigations to remain in place in Chicago for two to three weeks, until the COVID-19 positivity rate and hospitalizations decline.
Pritzker said that state officials aren’t planning to impose a stay at home order, though that’s “obviously” in the backs of their minds, depending on how effective the mitigations are, Block Club Chicago reported Tuesday (November 3).
Pritzker aimed “to remind everybody that it takes a couple to three weeks to see a set of mitigations start to have an effect on positivity and cases and so on,” he said in a press conference on Monday (November 2). “We’re hoping to get back to a point where we can open indoor service as soon as we can get” the numbers to decline.
Although Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot was worried that the ban could negatively affect local businesses, Pritzker stood by the mitigations.
“The same mitigations that went in place for other areas of the state that have tripped those metrics, where we’ve got people getting sick and going into the hospital — places like, Will County and in Kankakee, all the collar counties and many of the regions downstate — we’ve imposed the same sets of metrics and startup mitigations, and we’ll be doing that for the city of Chicago,” he previously said, according to the Chicago Sun-Times. “We’re both dedicated to the same thing, which is we want to keep people safe and healthy, and we want to keep the economy going while this virus is ravaging so many people.”
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