From Chicago’s first known COVID-19 case to the governor’s historic shelter-in-place order, here’s how those critical, frenzied early weeks of the pandemic unfolded, in the words of those at the center of the crisis.
On January 13, 2020, a Chicago-area woman in her 60s touched down at O’Hare International Airport after visiting the city of Wuhan in east-central China. Feeling unwell, she checked into Amita Health St. Alexius Medical Center in Hoffman Estates, and 11 days later test results showed she had what would soon become known as COVID-19. It was the first known case in Illinois and the second in the United States.
In the two months that followed, hundreds of new cases emerged in the state, most of them in and around Chicago. By the time of Illinois’s first COVID-related death, on March 16, the situation had grown concerning enough to warrant an unprecedented statewide shutdown of indoor service at thousands of bars and restaurants. All businesses deemed nonessential were soon shuttered as well. Then, on March 20, came the governor’s shelter-in-place order, which would take effect the next day, severely restricting people’s movements. It was all intended to lower infection transmission rates and “flatten the curve” so that Illinois, and especially the densely populated Chicago area, could avoid an overwhelming surge of outbreaks like the one in New York City, where refrigerated trucks were being used as makeshift morgues.
Now, one year later, as Chicagoans and millions of other Americans start to receive COVID vaccines, key government officials, public health leaders, physicians, and other early responders look back on the decisions made and actions taken during those critical early days of fear and uncertainty.
The Narrators
James Allen
Allison Arwady
Stephanie Black
Anne Caprara
Paul Casey
Ngozi Ezike
Nigel Goldenfeld
Rich Guidice
Tony Hu
Janice Jackson
Kiran Joshi
Jennifer Layden
Lori Lightfoot
Dan Maro
Sergei Maslov
J.B. Pritzker
Daniel Reaven
Rachel Rubin
Sam Toia
Tuesday, January 21 The Emergency Activation of O’Hare
On January 16, the day after returning from Wuhan, China, a 35-year-old man in the Seattle area visited an urgent care clinic complaining of a fever and a cough. On January 20, his test came back positive for COVID-19, making him America’s first known case. The next day, the federal government ordered that all flights from Wuhan be funneled to five U.S. airports, including O’Hare, where passengers would be screened for the virus.
ALLISON ARWADY Commissioner of the Chicago Department of Public Health
We had received the [January 5] World Health Organization report on confirmed cases of pneumonia from an unknown source. And then within 24 hours, we had gotten an alert [of a flu-like outbreak] from something called BlueDot [software that tracks infectious diseases]. January 7 is when WHO had said, “This is a novel coronavirus.” And now the first case was in the U.S. I was in New York the weekend before and we got the call from the CDC [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention]: “We’re activating O’Hare.” We also activated our city emergency operations center.
RICH GUIDICE Executive director of Chicago’s Office of Emergency Management and Communications
Once they put those flight restrictions in place, that’s when we realized this thing really had the potential to put us in the position that we’re in today.
LORI LIGHTFOOT Mayor of Chicago
I learned that the CDC had not been involved [in restricting flights]. And it didn’t sound like HHS [the Department of Health and Human Services] had really been involved. This was just something that was done at the White House level. We started to ask a lot of questions to federal authorities to understand what this directive meant. I talked to the acting head of the DHS [Department of Homeland Security]. I talked to the No. 2 or 3 person at HHS. I think the CDC was on at that point. But they couldn’t answer basic questions. We were asking, “What if somebody comes off a plane from Wuhan but is asymptomatic and says, ‘No, I’m good?’ How are we to compel them to quarantine? Who’s going to be responsible for that? We don’t have local authority to do that. Who’s going to pay for this? Where are they going to quarantine?” Simple questions they had no answers for whatsoever. Those calls really gave me no confidence that the federal government had its act together. They had no thought about how the directive was actually going to be carried out and what the impact was going to be on local authorities like us in Chicago. I raised such a ruckus that I had my own little private phone briefing with them, where it was clear that they were trying to get me to be quiet and not make noise. They didn’t really care much about how their directives were actually implemented, and we were pretty much on our own at the local level.
ARWADY Commissioner of the Chicago Department of Public Health
There was a lot of very early work that the public wasn’t really seeing, pulling together a lot of city departments around this O’Hare activation. Because it came with a lot of requirements for following travelers, and it required the ability to quarantine people coming from Wuhan. It was not easy to identify places interested in quarantining people.
Friday, January 24 Confirmation of Illinois’s First Case
State health officials announced during a morning news conference that the Chicago-area woman who’d returned from Wuhan on January 13 had a confirmed case of the novel coronavirus. Shortly after, her husband would test positive, marking America’s first known case of human-to-human transmission. At this point, 21 other Illinoisans were deemed “persons under investigation.” Because there were still so many unknowns and testing was scarce and slow — at the time, it took four to five days to get results — efforts were centered on containment.
RACHEL RUBIN Senior medical officer and co-lead at the Cook County Department of Public Health
The first two were a husband and wife, so no huge surprise there. But we did testing of anyone who was judged to be in their contacts, and nobody else was positive. So we didn’t find any secondary transmission beyond those two. I remember talking to our leadership in communicable diseases at that time. We had to protect the privacy of the individuals involved, because with these first cases we were very concerned about stigma and if people were going to be camping out on their front lawns. But at the same time, if letting out a certain amount of information would inform and shape the community, then we would do that.
KIRAN JOSHI Senior medical officer and co-lead at the Cook County Department of Public Health
Rachel texted me, saying, “We’ve got our first case,” and shared some details about it. As much as I had prepared myself, it did feel surreal. My head sort of went back to the Ebola days, when there was some widely circulated map of airplane travel across the globe. I was thinking how easily something could spread. We were in the northwest suburbs with a team from the Chicago Department of Public Health, the Illinois Department of Public Health, and CDC, and we were essentially working from the guidance that CDC had developed for MERS-CoV [Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus]. Because that was the closest we had.
NGOZI EZIKE Director of the Illinois Department of Public Health
“Persons under investigation” was a CDC term that, at the time, meant that you had a very simple symptomatology — fever and some respiratory symptoms, like shortness of breath or cough — and you had come from Wuhan or you had a connection to someone who was a confirmed case. So it was a very narrow definition. Clearly, we missed some people who maybe had no symptoms at all. We didn’t appreciate that you could still have this infection, which, from our TV screens, we had seen as a very severe one that had filled up these field hospitals set up in China.
JENNIFER LAYDEN Then deputy commissioner and chief medical officer of the Chicago Department of Public Health
We were fortunate because we had done a pandemic flu exercise [a simulation named Crimson Contagion run by the federal government in 2019] that walked us through a pandemic scenario and asked how we would stand up our response and who the key partners were. It’s not uncommon to do exercises, but this one had a lot of similarities to the eventual situation that unfolded.
LIGHTFOOT Mayor of Chicago
I think [Crimson Contagion] made a huge difference. And because our Department of Public Health does year-round preparations for any kind of public-health-related emergencies, Chicago had a stockpile of PPE [personal protective equipment], ventilators — all the things that people were talking about and were in short supply. With the exception of testing materials, because that was really kind of a new thing, we were very well supplied.
JOSHI Senior medical officer and co-lead at the Cook County Department of Public Health
Having the second case in the U.S. and the first case of person-to-person transmission was definitely a huge challenge for us. But I think it also kind of primed the pump in Illinois to take early and decisive action.
Sunday, February 2 The Mayor’s Chinatown Press Conference
A priority for local officials: calming an increasingly anxious public. During her first COVID-related press conference — held outdoors and, as a show of solidarity, in Chinatown — Lightfoot said the chances of contracting the virus remained “very low” and that mask wearing was unnecessary. There was still much to learn.
TONY HU Chinatown restaurateur
Some Chinese in the Chinatown neighborhood felt unsafe, felt racism. Because some people called COVID the “Chinese virus,” and that image stopped people from coming to Chinatown.
ARWADY Commissioner of the Chicago Department of Public Health
Initially, there was a lot of anti-Asian sentiment. There was a lot of potential for hysteria in ways that were not based in science and that had the potential to be very stigmatizing and send people off in crazy directions. In a lot of ways, I saw my role, and still see my role, as being honest about what is going on, but also trying to kind of shut down the unnecessary craziness.
STEPHANIE BLACK Medical director of the communicable disease program of the Chicago Department of Public Health
The guidance we were issuing was all based on CDC recommendations. In January and February, we had what we called a battle rhythm of anticipated conference calls, organizing and being ready to respond. Those were about readiness at the airport, or about what we call sentinel surveillance, which was a way for us to piggyback on flu testing. Any specimen for somebody who presented with fever and sore throat but was negative for influenza would get tested for COVID, to the extent that was possible. And we were on the phone regularly with our hospital colleagues, who were evaluating patients and saying, “Should we test this person?” At CDC, they had really stringent criteria for whom they would allow testing, and we kept pushing the envelope on that. We were just trying to find it out there in the community as early as we possibly could.
ARWADY Commissioner of the Chicago Department of Public Health
There was a lot of very positive energy early on. And certainly a lot of hard decisions were being made. The CDC was absolutely at the center of those decisions, and we were having a very traditional series of interactions with them, just as we would have had during Zika or Ebola. It was only later that they were not able to play the traditional, prominent public health role that they are best equipped to play.
February 3 to February 27 A Respite in Cases
Illinois’s first two COVID patients were discharged to home isolation on February 7. At that point, no other cases had been discovered. Nearly a month would pass before the next one surfaced. The first state to run CDC-sanctioned polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tests, the gold standard at the time, Illinois was one of only five states nationwide where testing was occurring. While President Donald Trump continued to downplay the virus, Nancy Messonnier, director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, warned of its mounting severity. “We need to be preparing for significant disruptions of our lives,” she said on February 25.
ANNE CAPRARA Governor J.B. Pritzker’s chief of staff
There were those two cases, and then there weren’t any. And so we were all standing there with bated breath, going, “What is going to happen here?” In early February, we started putting COVID calls on my nightly calendar. One of the first calls we did, I was in Springfield for the legislative session. IEMA [Illinois Emergency Management Agency], IDPH, and a large contingent of the governor’s office senior staff were getting on so that I could get updates from them and then go update the governor. We were monitoring, but I think we were all hopeful that a pandemic was never going to materialize.
EZIKE Director of the Illinois Department of Public Health
We know that we have those two cases, but how many does that really represent? What’s the multiplier? Even today when we diagnose 5,000, 10,000, 15,000 cases, we know we haven’t caught everybody. But because we test so aggressively, the multiplier number is much smaller than what it was in February and March, when we weren’t testing nearly as many. So for every one you found, how many others are out there?
J.B. PRITZKER Governor of Illinois
In mid-February, nobody was indicating that the United States was now going to be hit with a pandemic. But everybody could see that this was hitting the rest of the world. Italy locking down is a moment most people paid attention to — an entire country was now under a stay-at-home order. That certainly stopped everyone in their tracks.
LIGHTFOOT Mayor of Chicago
[At a February 26 press conference:] Am I gonna sit here and say with absolute certainty that we won’t have any other cases? No, I will not. But I want to make sure that people understand they should continue to go about their normal lives.
Friday, February 28 The Start of Pritzker’s Daily Press Briefings
At his first daily briefing, streamed live from the Thompson Center in the Loop, the governor was joined by his emergency management team leaders and Lightfoot. The tone was cautiously optimistic.
“We need to treat this like you would the flu,” said Governor Pritzker, accompanied by Mayor Lightfoot, at his first daily press briefing on February 28. Photograph: Antonio Perez/Chicago Tribune
CAPRARA Governor J.B. Pritzker’s chief of staff
We made a decision very early that we were going to put him in front of the press and he was going to go out there every day and talk to people. I believed strongly that there needed to be some voice just giving information, providing what we knew and projecting calm: “Hey, we’re going to deal with this.”
PRITZKER Governor of Illinois
[At the press conference:] We need to treat this like you would the flu. There’s no need for people to go out and get a mask. The fact is that all of the precautions you would normally take for the flu you can take here, and we believe those will be effective.
LIGHTFOOT Mayor of Chicago
[At the press conference:] None of us can stand here and say, “There’s no risk.” But we believe, based upon the diligence of the medical professionals … that the risk remains low … based upon the data that we know right now and where we’re seeing the condition spread in other parts of the world.
CAPRARA Governor J.B. Pritzker’s chief of staff
We got into a rhythm of how we informed the public. I would say, “I think we’re going to need to do this.” Then the governor would say, “I think you’re probably right.” And then we would spend the next day or two trying to pull together all the information we could find. The governor would then go out during his daily press conference and try to give signals to people, like, “Hey, this is what we’re looking at.” It was very strategic. We were very cognizant of the fact that we had to acclimatize people to the reality of what was likely to come their way.
SATURDAY, February 29, and monday, march 2 Cases 3 and 4 Are Announced
Any hopes that the Chicago area could avoid further COVID-19 exposure were dashed when two new cases were disclosed. On February 23, a suburban Cook County man in his 70s had entered Northwest Community Hospital in Arlington Heights with COVID-like symptoms and eventually tested positive. His wife, also in her 70s, contracted the virus and quarantined at home. At the governors’s Monday briefing, Ezike said the state was “still in containment mode.” But that wouldn’t be possible much longer.
ARWADY Commissioner of the Chicago Department of Public Health
I remember so clearly when we went from one to four cases. It was like, This is not going to be OK. I spent two decades of my life preparing for a pandemic, and I’ve read much of what there is to read. I’ve participated directly on the ground in the MERS and Ebola outbreaks. I know the real thing when I see it, and I recognized that this was it.
RUBIN Senior medical officer and co-lead at the Cook County Department of Public Health
It changed very quickly in terms of thinking, This isn’t going to be like a SARS thing; this is going to be something that’s much more serious than that.
ARWADY Commissioner of the Chicago Department of Public Health
I’d only been in the acting role [of commissioner] for six months and would talk to the mayor occasionally. All of a sudden, it was like, “I don’t know you that well, but we need to meet and make these decisions today.”
Officials at Northwest Community Hospital on March 2, after the Arlington Heights facility announced it was treating one of the state’s earliest COVID cases Photograph: Stacey Wescott/Chicago Tribune
DAN MARO Nurse in the emergency department at Northwest Community Hospital
We were fully staffed at the time because we were like, “OK, we’re going to get hit. This is coming.” When we had that first case [at Northwest Community], because we were like, “Oh my God, it’s from contact, it’s droplets, it’s whatever,” we were masking patients, and sometimes we were wearing masks, because we weren’t sure who needed it and who didn’t. The first patient, he sat out in his car at first, then they brought him through a decon[tamination] room, with him and us in masks and plastic gowns. We were trying to contain what we could, thinking that it was on skin, on clothes, and if you moved him it could go up in the air. We had enough PAPRs [powered air-purifying respirators], which are like battery packs you wear around your waist that filter air in and out, like in the movie E.T. If you could get your hands on an N95 mask, you would wear an N95. But we didn’t have enough of them. Nobody in the country had enough. The hospital had a sanitation program where they would nuke them and give them back to you.
DANIEL REAVEN Director of the emergency department at Northwest Community Hospital
We had started slowly preparing ourselves for the worst, based on what we had heard coming out of other countries and the fear of the unknown. And the worst was, God forbid, patients coming in by the hundreds who can’t breathe and who have horribly high fevers, and we have nothing we can do to help them. We didn’t know if every person who came in that had this was going to be dying at our doorstep.
PAUL CASEY Chief medical officer at Rush University Medical Center
When we were about a month and a half or two months into our preparedness efforts, some other hospitals called me and said, “We’re thinking about setting up a command center and we want to know what you guys have done.” And those calls were kind of alarming to me because the cases were already here. It made me grateful that we had been proactive about it. A number of us had spent about 45 days straight at the hospital, working 12-to-14-hour days to get [our COVID program] up and running. It was a massive undertaking. So you just felt a sense of urgency for those that hadn’t started the same effort.
A special isolation bay at Rush University Medical Center Photograph: Zbigniew Bzdak/Chicago Tribune
Thursday, March 5, and Friday, March 6 Cases 5 and 6 Are Announced
The fifth case was a 20-something Chicago-area resident and Vanderbilt University student who had been studying in Italy; the sixth, a teaching assistant at Vaughn Occupational High School in Portage Park who had taken a cruise.
CASEY Chief medical officer at Rush University Medical Center
The young man returning from Milan, Italy, had all the right symptoms, which he’d developed on the flight back. It was the first case at Rush where we said, “This has a really high likelihood of actually being COVID.” I received a notification before he landed that the parents wanted their son to be seen at Rush. So I went down to the emergency department just to make sure the team was prepared. We had practiced and trained around what we would do and made sure that everyone was appropriately outfitted with PPE. I actually wasn’t working clinically that day, but one of my colleagues who had a very young child had just returned from maternity leave. And I could tell from a quick conversation that she was really concerned about going in to see this patient. So I told her, “No problem, let me take this one.” That’s when you start really thinking through the risks. You’re not quite sure what’s going to come in the door. Maybe someone who looks incredibly toxic and ill. This young man looked quite well. He had some flu-like symptoms, but from a stability standpoint, he was sitting and talking with us. Still, in the back of your mind, you’re thinking, We know nothing at this point about how this is transmissible, or what risks are associated with the team in the room.
Given the dearth of testing and known cases, there was virtually no local COVID data available, so officials used computer modeling from Argonne National Laboratory and other groups to help them envision how the virus might spread. The researchers employed data from COVID-affected European countries and a metric called “doubling time” — how long it takes for an infectious disease to double in scope. The modeling also showed the impact of mitigation measures, including various shutdowns.
ARWADY Commissioner of the Chicago Department of Public Health
If there’s one thing I know how to read, it’s the basics of an epi curve. The slope of [Chicago’s] curve was absolutely tracking along with what we had seen in Italy and six or seven European countries that were just a couple of weeks ahead of us. I had a meeting with the mayor initially. And then she had me talk to the cabinet. Now the whole world is used to doubling time, but I remember teaching them about what it looks like. At this point, Italy’s health care system was getting overwhelmed, and there were a lot of really bad stories out of there. Seeing hospitals overrun in countries that had resources was so concerning to me, because if I had learned nothing from previous outbreaks, it was that if you had good resources, you could generally do what needed to be done. But to be sitting here in the U.S., in Chicago, and have this panicky feeling we might run out of health care resources was not something I had ever anticipated.
LIGHTFOOT Mayor of Chicago
I recall seeing early modeling that showed we were on the same trajectory as Italy, and it scared the bejesus out of me. We were very worried that we were going to have a catastrophic collapse of our health care system if we didn’t do something fairly dramatic.
ARWADY Commissioner of the Chicago Department of Public Health
Argonne National Lab built what’s called an agent-based model specifically for Chicago that predated COVID and mimics the movement of its 2.7 million residents. All the gyms, schools, and businesses are built in, and it [takes into account] how people interact throughout the day. So pretty early on, we connected with them to start thinking about using that Chicago model for COVID.
Monday, March 9 The State’s Disaster Proclamation
One day after a Cook County man was announced as Illinois’s seventh case and its first known instance of “community spread” — the spread of a disease to people who have had no known contact with other infected people — Pritzker issued a disaster proclamation that marshaled state resources to combat the virus. Four additional cases were revealed this day, all of them in Cook County. The next day saw eight more cases, including the first two outside Cook, bringing the state total to 19. The numbers were rising fast now, just as experts had predicted.
CAPRARA Governor J.B. Pritzker’s chief of staff
That weekend, a couple of us had gone to Disney World in Florida, where the AFL-CIO was going to be doing a political [forum] that week. It got canceled. We were like, “Wow, this is escalating very quickly.” So instead of staying in Florida, I got on a plane and came right back. By that Monday morning when we were back in the office, we were in full-on “What’s happening, what do we need to do?” [mode]. We had a bit of a head start because we’d been doing prep calls for so long. I’ll never forget some reporter wrote: “This feels like the week that the wheels come off the wagon.”
ARWADY Commissioner of the Chicago Department of Public Health
Up until early March, we’d been very busy, but with a focus on travelers. Once we knew there was community spread, we knew this outbreak was not in control. So you have to switch to communitywide mitigation. I’m just glad we didn’t wait another week.
CAPRARA Governor J.B. Pritzker’s chief of staff
We were having conversations with the city and county the Friday before about the idea that if this thing progressed, we might have to declare a state of emergency. Are we going to send people panicked into the streets if we do this? We declare a state of emergency for floods. We declare a state of emergency for storms. There was nothing that people had to base this one on. The truth is, a state of emergency is a bureaucratic thing. And there’s no way to do it quietly. You can’t just issue the paperwork. But we were very aware that once we used those words, it was going to be the lead story in every paper and on all the evening news broadcasts. And so we did it in close coordination with the local government structures, saying, “OK, we’re going to pull this trigger because we have to.”
SERGEI MASLOV Bioengineering professor at the University of Illinois
[My colleague Nigel Goldenfeld] and I were watching how the epidemic was unfolding in China and elsewhere. But on March 10, we started to be seriously concerned about what was happening in Illinois. Our offices are next door to each other, so we met after work and we started peeking at the numbers. That was maybe a week or so after the first cases started propagating. It looked like they were doubling every two and a half days or so, and that’s when we seriously panicked and realized that it was now spreading locally.
NIGEL GOLDENFELD Physics professor at the University of Illinois
When we started doing this, the only data you had, really, was cases. It wasn’t like you had a long history of hospital admissions to the ICU and things like that. So what we were doing was relatively primitive modeling by today’s standards. And we could see the data in Illinois was following the same trajectory as the data in northern Italy. You just had to extrapolate to see what was going to happen here if nothing was done. For the first calculation, we assumed that a lockdown had some sort of effectiveness, which was largely gauged from what happened in Wuhan. And then you could ask: If we did this today or next week or two weeks later in Illinois, how effective would that same mitigation be? And what we discovered was something that was intuitively obvious, which is the earlier you do it, the better. But what’s not intuitively obvious is that the magnitude of the potential savings of life and of hospital overflow is extremely large — much greater than you would guess.
Wednesday, March 11 Worldwide Pandemic Declared
The same day the World Health Organization declared a global pandemic, workers at One Prudential Plaza in the Loop were notified that a tenant’s employee had tested positive. It marked the first case of COVID in a downtown office building. Public health officials disclosed six new cases that day, bringing the total in Illinois to 25 — all in the Chicago metro area. The Chicago Board of Trade, normally a hive of activity, announced a temporary shutdown of its trading floor. By the end of the week, at the behest of local and state officials, businesses all over the city and suburbs would be telling their employees to work from home.
That Wednesday, Lightfoot, after discussions with Pritzker, canceled the St. Patrick’s Day parades downtown and in Beverly and Norwood Park that had been scheduled for Saturday and Sunday, saying they posed an “unnecessary risk” to public health. “We do believe it’s going to be a postponement,” Lightfoot added hopefully, “and we will work with them to get an appropriate date sometime in the future.”
CAPRARA Governor J.B. Pritzker’s chief of staff
We were approaching St. Patrick’s Day and going, “Oh my God, we’re going to have a million people on the streets in the next seven days.” The problem was, I didn’t have anything to base our response on. When was the last time somebody said, “OK, everybody stay in your house and don’t come out?” So we were like, “Can we do this? Should we do this? At what point do you pull the trigger?” We were communicating with the mayor’s office and Cook County and all of our legislators, and everybody was in this state of, “What do we do?” I said to the governor, “We’re just going to have to make a decision and live with it.”
ARWADY Commissioner of the Chicago Department of Public Health
The lead [official] in Seattle, who is one of the most experienced public health people I know, was deep in the heart of the first big community outbreak in the U.S. But he was still taking time to check in with us, and he was like, “Definitely cancel your parades.” And I think the mayor and the governor were very aligned in terms of the necessity to do that. People don’t think four cases is that bad, or eight cases or 16. But sitting here and seeing those numbers and the way they’re heading, you know they’re only a very tiny fraction of who actually has COVID.
GOLDENFELD Physics professor at the University of Illinois
The thing that’s shocking and difficult for people to understand is this: You could look at your hospital and say, “Half the beds are still empty, and it took us three weeks to get to this point. We’re fine.” But if your doubling time is two and a half days, by Thursday your hospital is full. On Saturday, you’ve got people being treated in your corridors. That’s how quickly exponential growth happens.
EZIKE Director of the Illinois Department of Public Health
There was a time when everyone was looking for PPE, which was limited because the major producers are in China, and they were shut down. And then when they started producing, they needed it for themselves and it wasn’t coming over here. We were all looking for angles: “I heard of a guy …” There was one [situation] where we had a promise of a large amount of PPE, and we were counting that in our tallies. When that expected date came, we found out that the seller had canceled on us and given it to the feds instead. We were literally fighting against each other and competing against the federal government for these critical supplies.
CAPRARA Governor J.B. Pritzker’s chief of staff
The federal government was nowhere to be found. And I don’t say that lightly; I’m a partisan Democrat, but I have never experienced anything like I experienced with the federal government in those early days. You’re in the middle of this thinking, OK, the cavalry is coming. Because the state has great resources, but they’re limited. We don’t have the CDC. We don’t have the Dr. Faucis of the world.
EZIKE Director of the Illinois Department of Public Health
We were very concerned that our vulnerable population would be in congregate care facilities like jails and detention centers. I came from a congregate care facility, so I know how things spread so quickly in those settings. We already knew, even before our first case in a nursing home, that we had to really fortify those areas. We had already stopped visitation [on March 11] and said, “You’re going to screen every staff member as they’re coming in.” I remember the pushback. Like, “That’s cruel and unusual punishment.”
PRITZKER Governor of Illinois
The National Governors Association was something I dove into from the very beginning of getting elected. And so I’d gotten to know Republicans and Democrats across the country and had a number of good relationships that I relied on to figure out what everybody else was doing. But here’s what it revealed: No one knew exactly what they should be doing. We were all acting on our own instincts and the best information that the scientists could provide us.
CAPRARA Governor J.B. Pritzker’s chief of staff
One of the most challenging parts of this is that the scientists, the epidemiologists, they were learning about this virus as we were dealing with it. We felt this constant pressure to try to stay as up on that information as possible. We had nothing to base our response on other than a pandemic a hundred years ago. I actually went out and bought every 1918 flu book I could find.
PRITZKER Governor of Illinois
I don’t want to sound like we were completely clueless. I was reading everything. I was reading Stat news site, which I had never heard of before. The Lantern medical journal. I was all of a sudden following certain doctors on Twitter to see what they were posting.
Friday, March 13 Public Schools to Close
The day before, as seven new cases were announced, the Chicago Teachers Union had sent a letter to Lightfoot and Chicago Public Schools CEO Janice Jackson. In light of the COVID case at Vaughn, CTU leaders expressed “extreme concern about plans for continued safe operation” of schools. They were particularly worried about the potential spread of COVID at CPS locations slated to serve as polling locations in the primary election on March 17. That Friday, Pritzker ordered all public schools statewide closed starting March 17 and continuing until March 30 — a period that would eventually extend much further. In Chicago, the decision affected about 350,000 students, many of whom depended on CPS for meals, special needs support, and other vital resources.
JANICE JACKSON CEO of Chicago Public Schools
By the second week of March, it had become very clear that this situation was very different than anything any of us would experience in our lifetimes. This virus was moving rapidly, and we were going to have to shift and think about how to educate our students given the impact the pandemic would likely have on schools. We had been talking to the governor and his team, and initially thought a closure would be for two weeks, maybe a month. We wanted to make sure that services our families relied on from CPS were up and running.
CAPRARA Governor J.B. Pritzker’s chief of staff
No one in that moment thought schools were going to be shut down for almost a year. And in those early days, we just didn’t know — and still don’t know 100 percent — what COVID was going to do to people. We didn’t know if kids were going to be affected worse than parents. We didn’t know if you got it and then dropped dead the next day. I think we were all haunted by the idea that if we didn’t do this quickly enough and we had an outbreak in a school, would we have acted too late? I just tossed and turned. I think the governor agonized over it. And I could tell, talking to the mayor’s office and Janice Jackson, that it was gut wrenching for them too.
LIGHTFOOT Mayor of Chicago
There was a sense of urgency around making sure that everybody was protected. But we didn’t have the data we have now that shows that schools are actually relatively safe, particularly if you’ve put in all the mitigation measures that we’ve done at CPS. My biggest concern was that we had to stand up an entire new remote learning system in [a very short] period and notify parents. There’s a lot that goes into opening or closing a school, and we had very little time to do any of that when the governor made his announcement that schools were shut down.
Mayor Lightfoot toured a Chicago Public Schools command center on March 16, the day before school closures were to go into effect statewide. Photograph: Terrence Antonio James/Chicago Tribune
PRITZKER Governor of Illinois
Closing schools was a very difficult thing to do, but it was the right thing. What you’re trying to do is limit movement. Once there was confirmation of community spread, mobility meant spreading.
CAPRARA Governor J.B. Pritzker’s chief of staff
We realized very early on that the worst thing we could do is not make a decision. Because then a decision was going to get made for us by circumstances or events or other people. That really has to come out of our office, because if we didn’t do it, then it became anarchy.
JACKSON CEO of Chicago Public Schools
I trusted then, and I trust now, that the governor would only make a decision to protect us. And I thought it was the right decision.
CAPRARA Governor J.B. Pritzker’s chief of staff
In March, when the craziest stuff was going on, I walked into the governor’s office. He has a whiteboard where we had written down our priorities for the year — things that we were going to look at to make sure we were advancing our policy goals and everything else. He and I were sitting there looking at this list of things that we had wanted to get done. I erased everything on the board and wrote: “No. 1: Survive,” “No. 2: Pass the budget in May,” and “No. 3: Make sure democracy continues.”
PRITZKER Governor of Illinois
I’ve not erased it since that day. The other thing that’s on the whiteboard are little boxes that say “Choice A: Lots of people die,” “Choice B: Less people die.”
Saturday, March 14 St. Patrick’s Day–Fueled Revelry
Chicago and its suburbs were experiencing one COVID-related closure after another. On March 12, Pritzker had mandated the cancellation of events with more than 1,000 people and strongly suggested postponing those with more than 250. The next day, the Archdiocese of Chicago had suspended in-person Mass and closed its 217 schools, which serve more than 78,000 students. City Colleges of Chicago had halted all classes that weren’t online, a move followed by other area colleges, including the University of Chicago, the University of Illinois at Chicago, DePaul, and Loyola. Every museum had shuttered, too, as had the Adler Planetarium, Shedd Aquarium, and Lincoln Park Zoo.
Still, hordes of people partied over the weekend like it was 2019. St. Patrick’s Day was coming up on the 17th, after all, and celebratory imbibing is a long-standing Chicago tradition.
PRITZKER Governor of Illinois
[At his daily briefing:] I realize it’s St. Patrick’s Day weekend. But large groups gathering is just not helpful. People, please stay in your neighborhood, stay home if you can.
BLACK Medical director of the communicable disease program of the Chicago Department of Public Health
I remember Lori being completely alarmed by all of the partying that was happening. You could see people filling bars, and it was like, “People are not listening, and we have to do something drastic.”
PRITZKER Governor of Illinois
The public reacts to whatever it knows. This was just our young people going out drinking and jamming into bars and restaurants, and how we communicated with them was all part of what we were trying to tackle.
CAPRARA Governor J.B. Pritzker’s chief of staff
We were mad. We were like, “We’re agonizing over this stuff, and these idiots are standing outside waiting to get in to drink.” I think about it in the context of what we know now, and it’s so hard to understand. Nobody was telling us at the time, “Make sure everybody wears a mask.” There wasn’t any of that out there. You had people out in the streets, let’s just say, releasing fluids. All I could think was, Oh my God, we’re in the middle of a pandemic.
Sunday, March 15 The Shutdown of Bars and Restaurants
During his daily press conference that morning, with the number of known cases in Illinois at 93 (76 in the Chicago area), Pritzker announced the suspension of indoor drinking and dining at all Illinois bars and restaurants starting at the end of business that Monday. The decision affected more than 25,000 restaurants and nearly 600,000 workers, the majority of them in and around Chicago. In an attempt to curb further partying that weekend, Lightfoot declared via a late-morning tweet that Chicago’s liquor-serving establishments had to limit capacity to half the maximum occupancy, capped at 100, until Pritzker’s order kicked in.
LIGHTFOOT Mayor of Chicago
[In her announcement:] We saw people engaging in very risky behavior: sharing drinks, sharing flasks, lines queued up. We have to stop that and shut that down. … We’re trying to do everything we can to stabilize that part of our economy, but we need the restaurants and bar owners to be our partner. … They’ve got to step up. What we saw yesterday is totally unacceptable. … If we have to be the parent and the adult in the room to make sure that bars are doing what is necessary, then we’re going to do that.
PRITZKER Governor of Illinois
[At the daily briefing:] The time for persuasion and public appeals is over. The time for action is here. This is not a joke. No one is immune to this, and you have an obligation to act in the best interests of all the people of this state.
Time Out Market in the West Loop on March 15, the day the governor declared that restaurants and bars would have to halt dine-in service Photograph: Brian Cassella/Chicago Tribune
CAPRARA Governor J.B. Pritzker’s chief of staff
The modelers from the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana sent us a [slide] deck. A lot of it was highly technical formulas and how they got to their conclusion, and as a non–math major it didn’t make a ton of sense to me. But one slide will always be blazed in my memory. It said: “Number of deaths in Chicago without mitigations. Number of deaths in Chicago with mitigations.” And the number of deaths in Chicago without mitigations was 6,000 more. I walked it down to the governor immediately, put the one slide down [on his desk], circled the numbers, and said, “Look at this.” And he sat and stared at it for 10 minutes.
PRITZKER Governor of Illinois
[That slide] has been sitting on the left-hand corner of my desk since mid-March. The first thing I had to do was step back and say, “Do these scientists have their act together? Is this right?” Then I talked to them and I spoke with a couple of epidemiologists. And I came to the conclusion that it was probably more right than wrong.
CAPRARA Governor J.B. Pritzker’s chief of staff
I just think there was a sense of everybody looking around and going, “Somebody’s got to do something.”
BLACK Medical director of the communicable disease program of the Chicago Department of Public Health
At that point, we didn’t have the data about transmission in restaurants and closed settings. But I think everyone was concerned about that.
SAM TOIA CEO of the Illinois Restaurant Association
The No. 1 concern of any restaurant owner-operator is the health and safety of their team members and guests. As the weeks went on, people got more and more anxious, more and more nervous: “How am I going to make my payroll?” “How am I going to pay my rent?” “How am I gonna pay my vendors?” But that first week it was like, “Hey, it’s America, we’re coming together. Let’s figure this out.”
PRITZKER Governor of Illinois
This is about the closest thing I can imagine to managing a war effort. By the time we got to the middle of March, it’s like we had been through three battles already. Like in a war, you don’t know exactly what the enemy is doing; your intelligence information isn’t perfect. We did the best we could with the data and the information that we had at each moment we were making decisions. And across the board, there were people who didn’t like those decisions. Closing schools, closing bars and restaurants, shutting down St. Patrick’s Day. There’s no joy in Mudville, as they say. And every one of these decisions was a choice between bad and worse.
LIGHTFOOT Mayor of Chicago
I think the reality is that, because it was early days and people were very afraid of this virus, both the governor and I were given a lot of grace and leeway.
Based on rising case numbers and the reckless gatherings he’d witnessed that Friday and Saturday, Pritzker disclosed on Meet the Press that Sunday that he was “seriously considering” a statewide lockdown. “COVID-19 is spreading because even healthy people can be walking around, giving it to other people,” he said.
JOSHI Senior medical officer and co-lead at the Cook County Department of Public Health:
One of the things that was guiding a lot of decision making around shutdowns at the time was a paper looking at outcomes from the 1918 influenza pandemic. It showed that cities that instituted shutdowns early and thoroughly had much better outcomes than those that waited. I remember thinking in early March, OK, it’s a matter of time. But we were unclear about where the shutdown orders would come from. Would it be a local or a state decision?
PRITZKER Governor of Illinois
The state was the lead on most everything early on. Because I was focused on the data and really connecting with some of the best doctors available, I had some insights that maybe other jurisdictions in Illinois didn’t have. When I would call [local] leaders and say, “Here’s what we’re going to have to do next,” for some, it was like, “OK, I get it. We’re in an emergency.” But for others, there were concerns about moving too quickly, and there was an adjustment period — sometimes a couple of hours, sometimes a day. It would’ve been longer had I not said, “We are going to do this, and it’s unfortunate that you may not agree.”
Tuesday, March 17 Election Day
At the top of the day’s briefing, with the statewide case count at 160, Pritzker announced Illinois’s first COVID-related death: a Chicago woman in her 60s with underlying conditions. (She would later be more specifically identified as a retired nurse from the South Side.) But his tone soon shifted from mournful to defiant. Despite all the precautionary measures he had instituted — just the day before, he had put a 50-person limit on crowds at bowling alleys, private clubs, and fitness centers — one thing the governor refused to adjust was in-person voting on the day of the primary election, claiming that he didn’t have the authority. Not everyone agreed with that decision or his reasoning behind it, including at least one Chicago Board of Election Commissioners official who had urged him days earlier to cancel in-person voting and extend the mail-in deadline to mid-May.
JAMES ALLEN Then spokesman for the Chicago Board of Election Commissioners
[On a call with the media:] How do you reconcile [limits on gatherings] with having an election? This is not anywhere near a normal situation. This is a global pandemic, and it was a snowball we could all see coming down the hill.
PRITZKER Governor of Illinois
[At the daily briefing:] There are people out there today who want to say, “Oh, it’s a crisis. Bend the rules and overstep your authority.” Let me tell you this: It is exactly in times like these when the constitutional boundaries of our democracy should be respected above all else.
CAPRARA Governor J.B. Pritzker’s chief of staff
First of all, we couldn’t have converted it to mail-in ballots at that point. Setting up a mailing system takes months. There are logistical issues about getting people’s ballots out. And then there’s the whole legal aspect of it, which our lawyers were very clear on: The governor does not have the power to move an election.
PRITZKER Governor of Illinois
My general counsel and I looked at every angle on this. Could we get the secretary of state involved somehow? But there isn’t a way to do it in Illinois. So all we could do is call up the boards of elections and say, “What are your problems and how can we help you solve them?” We were told by the Chicago board of elections that they had it under control and don’t worry. Even if we had the authority, when would you move the election to?
CAPRARA Governor J.B. Pritzker’s chief of staff
We felt pretty strongly that in the middle of chaos, we had to be true to some of the most important elements of our democracy — that people shouldn’t feel like the country was crumbling around them. We understood that a lot of our authority to deal with the pandemic had to do with us adhering to the law and not appearing like we were circumventing something.
LIGHTFOOT Mayor of Chicago
I think I would have postponed the election if I had the ability to do so. And I urged it to be postponed. But once the governor made the determination that we were going forward, we needed to make sure that it was done in a safe manner that didn’t put people at risk.
ARWADY Commissioner of the Chicago Department of Public Health
I remember how somber everything was around the election. I went to early-vote at the library near where I live. There was dead silence and a sense of fear. Things were as spaced as they could be, and there was lots of hand sanitizer. I was starting to get recognized, and there was some applause; people let me skip the line. There were a lot of unknowns, but this was an essential thing, and I was very reassured to see it happening so calmly.
Friday, March 20 The Statewide Stay-at-Home Order
The evening before — on March 19, a day on which the state’s total COVID cases hit 422 and its death toll quadrupled from one to four (including an elderly woman from Cook County) — Lightfoot delivered a livestreamed address from City Hall. Backdropped by American and Chicago flags, she struck hopeful notes about the city’s historic resiliency in the face of crises. She also issued a stern warning to Chicago-area residents who felt ill with respiratory and other COVID-related symptoms: Stay home or “there will be consequences.”
The next afternoon, shadowed by 163 new confirmed cases statewide (for a total of 585) and one additional death, Pritzker announced a stay-at-home order that restricted the movement of all Illinoisans, beginning March 21 and initially extending through April 7. During that span, all nonessential businesses were required to cease operating. The hope was that, paired with social distancing (mask wearing at this point was still not yet advised), the move would slow the rapid spread of cases and, therefore, hospitalizations. As Pritzker spoke, planning was underway to convert McCormick Place into a 3,000-bed field hospital that could handle patient overflow in the event of a massive case surge.
Preparations were underway on March 29 to turn McCormick Place into a field hospital. Photograph: Patrick L. Pyszka/City of Chicago
PRITZKER Governor of Illinois
I decided to issue our stay-at-home order the day before. As it happened, [Governor] Gavin Newsom had announced one in California just a couple hours before I announced ours. The first call I had with legislators, where I was explaining to them the [University of Illinois] model, was right before we issued the order. Some of them, particularly some Republicans, said, “I want to see the model; show me all the data.” As if they’re going to analyze this model from these literal rocket scientists any better than I or anybody else would.
ARWADY Commissioner of the Chicago Department of Public Health
We went in about a week from “We need to be canceling parades” to “We need to be going all the way to shutdown.” That’s an amazingly fast shift.
CAPRARA Governor J.B. Pritzker’s chief of staff
What we realized as we worked on this was that you had to be willing to leap before it felt comfortable.
EZIKE Director of the Illinois Department of Public Health
If you have no income, if your job that provides you insurance is gone, if you aren’t able to feed yourself, that is a problem. That’s going to cause a bunch of attacks on your physical and mental health. And I don’t want to seem that I’m divorced from that. But at the end of the day, if you’re not alive, you don’t get a chance to work on those other things.
The city rented downtown hotel rooms to quarantine patients. Photograph: Patrick L. Pyszka/City of Chicago
As cases continued to proliferate in Illinois and elsewhere across the nation, Pritzker was one of the country’s more vocal governors calling out the federal government — and President Trump personally — for bungling the pandemic response. “This is an incredible failure by the federal government, and every day that they continue to abdicate their responsibilities is another day that we fall behind,” he had said at the March 17 briefing. “I’ve requested and now I’m demanding that the White House, the FDA, and the CDC produce a rapid increase in test deployment nationwide, or get out of the way and allow us to obtain them elsewhere ourselves.”
PRITZKER Governor of Illinois
I had been in touch directly with people at the White House. I got a call back from [trade adviser] Peter Navarro. He asked what I needed in PPE, I told him, and he said, “Let me see what I can do.” Then [on March 23] I spoke with the president and told him several of the things we needed and that he should invoke the Defense Production Act, because this was going to be a massive challenge that the federal government really needed to help the states with. He concluded by asking me, “What specifically do you need?” And so I gave him a couple of the items. After that, I got another call from Peter Navarro, and this time he said, “The president wants me to help you, so I’m going to.” He made it sound like this was not something he did for other states. He said, “We have a private stockpile of ventilators.” I was like, What do you mean? Because at the same time, I’m talking to FEMA [the Federal Emergency Management Agency] and the Department of Health and Human Services, and they’re telling me they don’t have anything. But I wasn’t really going to question it on the call because I just wanted to save people’s lives. I told him how many ventilators and N95 masks we needed, and he said, “I’ve got that in the stockpile, and we’re going to get it to you in Trump time.” What the hell is Trump time? He said, “Give me the name and address of where you want it delivered, and we’ll get it to you by tomorrow afternoon” — or something like that. Four or five days later, 300 ventilators and a couple hundred thousand masks arrived. But instead of N95 masks, we got surgical masks. And some of the ventilators were BiPAP [bilevel positive airway pressure] machines. I think we only got 5 or 10 percent of what we asked for. And at that point, four or five days felt like four or five weeks.
LIGHTFOOT Mayor of Chicago
It was a continuing problem. [The federal government] never, ever talked to the mayors. They talked to governors eventually. And then they stood up some propaganda calls from their Office of Intergovernmental Affairs. It was basically “Aren’t we great? We’re doing all this good stuff,” when people were dying, when people were terrified. It was a joke.
The empty pedestrian bridge over Columbus Drive on March 24, three days after the governor’s stay-at-home order began Photograph: Zbigniew Bzdak/Chicago Tribune
Epilogue
New case numbers began dropping in mid-May and remained at a relatively low plateau through late August. Consequently, hospitals weren’t overrun and McCormick Place sat mostly empty. Then the virus resumed its rampage, rising and falling and ultimately peaking on November 13 at a record daily high of 15,415 new reported and probable cases statewide. As of the end of February, Illinois had seen 1,186,696 cases and 20,536 deaths. Those numbers in the metro area alone stood at 750,777 and 13,351, respectively — the latter more than quintuple the cumulative number of lives lost in the fire of 1871, the Iroquois Theatre fire of 1903, the Eastland disaster of 1915, and the heat wave of 1995. Among the deadliest events in Chicago history, it is already second only to the influenza pandemic of 1918. Yet it could have been worse.
PRITZKER Governor of Illinois
Look at how many people died between the time I put the stay-at-home order on and the time we reached a peak. It was six weeks, from about March 20 to May 6. Every day it was going up and up and up, and the number of people who were tested and contracting it was going up and up and up. We now know it would have been much, much worse if we had not had a stay-at-home order, if we had not had a limit on bars and restaurants, if we had not closed schools.
ARWADY Commissioner of the Chicago Department of Public Health
Don’t get me wrong, we got hit hard here in Chicago, in particular during that first wave. But we did manage to bend that curve before overwhelming the health care system, and that was not to be taken for granted. Even a few days or a week of thinking about it more [before taking action] would have probably led to an outcome more like we saw in New York.
CAPRARA Governor J.B. Pritzker’s chief of staff
I read a book a number of years ago about how people react in a violent event, like a plane crash — what your instincts are, how one person will die and the person sitting right next to them will escape. Those days in March and April felt like the plane had crashed, that the country was sitting in a fiery wreck. And there were some people standing up, going, “Hey, I know the way out, let’s go,” and there were others sitting in their chair just totally paralyzed. It felt like that all the time, because you were saying, “Let’s go do this unprecedented thing.” You thought you were doing the right thing based on what you read, but you just didn’t know. That was probably the hardest.
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