As the weather turned sunny, and uncommonly warm, in late March, Chicagoans flocked to the eighteen-mile-long public path along Lake Michigan, cycling, running, walking, rollerblading, chatting, laughing—and ignoring the stay-at-home order that Illinois Governor J. B. Pritzker had issued a few days earlier. Lori Lightfoot, Chicago’s mayor, was not amused. On March 26th, she tweeted, “This is not a vacation. While most of our residents understand this, some have refused to listen. So for the good of the city, we are immediately closing high-traffic areas of the city until further notice.”
With Illinois racing toward an anticipated COVID-19 peak in mid-April, Lightfoot and Pritzker, political neophytes who took office in 2019, have been setting the policy and the tone for the nation’s third-largest city and its sixth-largest state. More than two hundred people have died from the virus in Illinois, and Pritzker has extended his stay-at-home order for the state’s nearly thirteen million residents to April 30th. Despite their pleas to the Trump Administration, starting two months ago, federal support has been minimal, unpredictable, and deeply disappointing, as they explained in interviews this week. Saying that he was speaking for governors around the country, Pritzker told me, “We’re finding ways to work around the federal government, which just shouldn’t be something coming out of the mouth of a governor, but that’s absolutely the case.”
Pritzker deduced early that Illinois could not turn to the Trump Administration for help. “They’ve made a lot of promises,” he said. “At first, I would rely on those promises, because I think you should be able to rely upon the federal government and the White House when they tell you something. But, over time, I got frustrated. They weren’t delivering.” After he spoke with Trump, on March 23rd, the Administration promised to send the state three hundred ventilators and three hundred thousand N95 respirator masks. The following week, when the material arrived, Pritzker’s staff discovered that the shipment did not include the N95 masks, which are used by doctors and other medical workers in high-risk situations. Instead, it contained far less protective surgical masks. “I can’t emphasize enough how much we need the federal government to step up and amplify the size of their P.P.E. deliveries to Illinois and, frankly, across the nation,” Pritzker said on March 30th, using the acronym for personal protective equipment.
The federal response has been “woefully inadequate. They’re not the cavalry,” Lightfoot told me. She convenes an hour-long conference call each Sunday night with as many as three hundred mayors and local officials in the Chicago region, and she keeps in contact with big-city mayors elsewhere. “What I’m hearing from mayors across the country is this little bit of the allocation that they’re getting is essentially worthless. It’s product that is expired and, worse, that is really in poor condition and disintegrating.” In late March, for example, the federal government sent a hundred and seventy ventilators from a national stockpile, maintained by the Department of Health and Human Services, to Los Angeles; Mayor Eric Garcetti reported that they were not working when they arrived.
Despite a continuing shortage of testing, Lightfoot said that a combination of public and private institutions have been able to meet many of Chicago’s most urgent needs. She worries more about other places “that don’t have the kind of resources that we have here.” The city has signed contracts for twenty-six hundred hotel rooms where patients can be housed, including some who are recovering but not yet able to return home. In one sign of federal coöperation, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is rapidly converting Chicago’s massive McCormick Place convention center into a field hospital, designed for patients who need limited treatment or isolation. To help with electronic learning in Chicago’s public schools—the nation’s third-largest public-education system, with nearly three hundred thousand students—city authorities will distribute more than a hundred thousand computers or tablets. Packets containing educational-enrichment activities and projects are being delivered to food-distribution sites. Police and jailers are reducing prison populations, as the number of inmates testing positive is rising.
To get residents to “stay home, save lives,” as she put it in a series of video sketches, Lightfoot sometimes uses humor. One social-media post shows her playing guitar and singing badly, rooting for the White Sox, telling a friend to skip a pedicure, fluffing pillows, and writing “Stay Home!” in flour. She has been delighted by a series of widely shared memes, lighthearted and supportive, that depict her sternly presiding over the stay-at-home order. In one image, her face replaces Batman’s in a spotlight projected into the night sky.
On Saturday, March 28th, I drove the eighteen-mile length of the Lakeshore Trail to see whether Chicagoans were following Lightfoot’s orders to stay away from the city’s most popular outdoor spaces. I saw rolls of yellow crime-scene tape and blue police barricades, and not a single biker, runner, or walker east of Lake Shore Drive. Millennium Park, home to the mirror-like “Cloud Gate” sculpture, was fenced off. “Millennium Park is closed to the public until further notice,” signs read. “Please maintain social distancing, avoid gathering in groups and practice frequent handwashing.” On the normally crowded Michigan Avenue, electric signs flashed, “Alone together. Stay home if you can,” and “¡Lavate las manos!” A bus on the C.T.A.’s 147 route advertised a now-shuttered Second City comedy revue, “Do You Believe in Madness?” The only person aboard was the driver.
The challenges remain greatest for countless low-income Chicagoans who live in neighborhoods where stores are few and public transportation is limited. “We’re seeing a lot of people losing their employment and needing assistance with food,” Ana Quijano, a coördinator in South Chicago for the nonprofit Claretian Associates, which has been delivering free canned goods and gift cards to some of the dozens of families and elderly residents who live in Claretian’s housing, said. The prospects are only growing more daunting, with the extension of the statewide shelter-in-place order. “Access to food—and nutritious food—is a big, big barrier for many individuals,” Bob Gallo, who directs the Illinois office of A.A.R.P., said. “What do you do if you’re home and you need to go to the drugstore? How do you get there if you’re afraid?” In late March, Lightfoot held a telephone town hall with A.A.R.P.’s Illinois chapter. More than twenty thousand people took the call or listened live on Facebook.
Long before Lightfoot became a meme, she wrote a letter to President Trump, asking that the White House base its decisions regarding the coronavirus on “the best available science” and coördinate with the country’s mayors. The date was February 6th, one day after the Senate voted to acquit the President on two articles of impeachment. At that point, there were twelve confirmed COVID-19 cases in the United States. In her letter, Lightfoot said she appreciated that federal agencies were “devoting their best people and resources,” and that they were facing a “rapidly evolving situation.” But she took issue with the White House proclamation, issued on January 31st, that barred entry into the country to some foreign travellers who had been in China during the previous fourteen days. While Trump claimed that he “closed our Country to China,” the order was full of exceptions, allowing the entry, for example, of “any alien whose entry would not pose a significant risk of introducing, transmitting, or spreading the virus.” It was unclear how screeners would know who posed a significant risk or how the screening would be accomplished; last year, U.S. airports welcomed an average of fourteen thousand passengers a day from China. The order also called for the quarantine, “where appropriate,” of arriving passengers “who may have been exposed to the virus.” It did not offer any guidance about how to create the quarantines, who would run them, or who would pay.
With the complex decree set to take effect just forty-eight hours after it was issued, Lightfoot and her staff scrambled to make sense of it. She convened a weekend phone call with the mayors of several cities with airports that would be expected to cope with fallout. “What became clear was we weren’t getting straight answers,” Lightfoot said, referring to the Trump Administration. “You could talk to the same person and you’d get a different answer, depending on what city you were in. It was a mess. That told me, right then and there, that we were going to be in this for ourselves, meaning cities and states were not going to be able to rely upon the federal government.”
In her letter to Trump, which was co-signed by the mayors of New York, Los Angeles, Seattle, Detroit, and San Francisco, Lightfoot asked for clear guidance and a promise of federal support, including for the costs of housing any travellers who required a quarantine, especially those deemed to be at high risk. She warned that testing laboratories would be swamped and reminded the President that “national capacity has not been adequate to quickly test our highest-risk individuals.” “The response, she told me, “was, basically, ‘Hey, don’t send us a letter—just pick up the phone and call.’ I’m, like, ‘We have, and you’re not giving us the right answers. You’re not giving us any answers.’ ” (The White House did not respond to a request for comment.)
The Trump Administration’s actions since then have only confirmed Lightfoot’s doubts, and deepened her anger. On March 11th, Trump again created chaos at major American airports by suddenly imposing restrictions on travel from Europe, which he misstated in a national television address and then had to correct. Again, the mayors were given no warning. Thousands of passengers, racing to get home, crowded into the arrival halls at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport and elsewhere, sometimes waiting hours to make it through customs. As Lightfoot put it, federal agencies “didn’t have a plan and they didn’t partner with us to figure it out.” She pointed out that the federal government has full authority over international arrivals. “That kind of sent me around the bend. I’m not a mayor who takes every opportunity to poke the President in the eye, but I was furious at that.”
After the airport calamity subsided, Lightfoot wrote to Vice-President Mike Pence, who chairs the federal COVID-19-response team. This letter, dated March 18th, again urged the White House to collaborate with the cities and counties where the struggle against the virus is being waged. Lightfoot asked Pence to incorporate local voices in the government’s strategies by putting together a bipartisan, geographically diverse advisory group of mayors and county officials. She said that she would be eager to participate. “There’s a hunger to be helpful, and yet we’re left to our own devices,” Lightfoot said. “Of course, I’ve gotten no response.”
Pritzker and his staff operate from a state office building downtown, in Chicago’s largely deserted Loop. “All of us, really, are working between sixteen and eighteen hours a day,” he told me, on March 29th. “I guess that includes lunch and dinner, but we’re here at the office.” They order takeout meals. Pritzker, a Hyatt heir and venture capitalist who contributed a hundred and seventy-one million dollars to his own election campaign, in 2018, and has dipped into his pockets for millions of dollars for state projects, picks up the tab. He usually gets up at about 4:30 A.M. and sets to work well before dawn. That day, he said the first thing he did was read an article that recommended the widespread use of masks to limit the spread of the virus. The next thing, he said, was to call a public official—he didn’t say who—to ask how doable that would be. “And then I began looking at our stockpile of surgical masks. That was the beginning of a day.”
Pritzker’s biggest continuing frustration is the fight to obtain protective gear, ventilators, and testing components—despite Trump, astonishingly, telling governors on a conference call last Monday, “I haven’t heard about testing being a problem.” Suppliers tell Pritzker that he is competing for scarce material not only with other states and the federal government but also with other countries. It’s like the “wild West,” Pritzker told me. He has repeatedly called on the federal government to coördinate purchasing, to prevent prices from skyrocketing and to improve the chances of an equitable distribution of goods. Pritzker also wants Trump to invoke the Defense Production Act in regard to testing materials, something that the President has done in only two cases thus far: pushing several companies to manufacture ventilators and requiring that 3M deliver N95 masks.
During his quest to acquire tests, Pritzker learned, last Friday, that Abbott Laboratories, located in a northern suburb of Chicago, was about to release daily fifty thousand COVID-19 tests that can return results in minutes. That night, Priztker told me, he called the company’s executives, “to say, ‘I want every test you’ve got.’ Literally, I said, ‘I’ll buy every test you’ll sell me.’ ” They reported that the federal government was also trying to buy them. Pritzker recalled replying, “Well, hey, can we get ahead of them, because they usually don’t fulfill on that for weeks?” (Abbott Laboratories did not respond to a request for comment.) Pritzker said that members of his staff have been up in the middle of the night, trying to reach European and Asian equipment suppliers.
On March 22nd, after Pritzker criticized the federal government for not doing more, Trump fired back on Twitter. He said that Pritzker “and a very small group of certain other Governors, together with Fake News @CNN & Concast (MSDNC), shouldn’t be blaming the Federal Government for their own shortcomings. We are there to back you up should you fail, and always will be!” Trump has also called Jay Inslee, the Democratic Governor of Washington, a “snake,” and referred to Gretchen Whitmer, the Democratic Governor of Michigan, as “Gretchen ‘half-Whit’ Whitmer.” Pritzker said he has spoken with Inslee and Whitmer multiple times. He praised them for doing “terrific jobs” and said, “We’re all advising each other, talking to each other, about what our next steps are.” As for the President, “That’s who Donald Trump is. He has clearly demonstrated that when things are not going well for him, he looks for someone else to blame.” Regarding his own approach, he said, “We’re in the fight of our lives. When the federal government is failing, when the President is saying things that aren’t true, I believe it’s my obligation to correct him and to speak out.”
The epidemiologists and mathematicians who are constantly updating the state’s models foresee a COVID-19 crest in Chicago in roughly the next two weeks. Recent projections show that the shutdowns and the social-distancing policies are “beginning to bend the curve,” Pritzker told me. Although the pace and the intensity of the coronavirus wave are not fully predictable, he is looking beyond the peak, to the downslope, trying to envision how the state emerges. Doctors and scientists are working on serological tests, to determine who has had the virus and now may have protective antibodies. School leaders are considering how to make up for lost time. Employers are watching consumer demand. “Unlike what the President said, it doesn’t look like we’re going to simply just lift every order that’s been put in place and then everybody can go about their business,” Pritzker said. “Life is going to be different. It won’t look the same on the other side of the peak as it did several months ago.”
A Guide to the Coronavirus
- How to practice social distancing, from responding to a sick housemate to the pros and cons of ordering food.
- How people cope and create new customs amid a pandemic.
- What it means to contain and mitigate the coronavirus outbreak.
- How much of the world is likely to be quarantined?
- Donald Trump in the time of coronavirus.
- The coronavirus is likely to spread for more than a year before a vaccine could be widely available.
- We are all irrational panic shoppers.
- The strange terror of watching the coronavirus take Rome.
- How pandemics change history.
