The Latest
Five-minute COVID-19 tests coming to Walgreens stores in Illinois
Walgreens expects to have 15 drive-thru testing sites across seven states up and running later this week.
The Deerfield-based drugstore chain will have testing sites in Illinois as well as Arizona, Florida, Kentucky, Louisiana, Tennessee and Texas. The new sites will use Abbott’s new COVID-19 test, which can return a positive result in 5 minutes and a negative result in 13 minutes.
The test locations haven’t been finalized. Walgreens expects to be able to test up to 3,000 people per day.
Walgreens will dedicate temporary space outside of the stores, where its pharmacists will supervise the self-administered COVID-19 tests.
— BiIl Ruminski
News
10:12 a.m. These companies are issuing auto insurance refunds during stay-at-home order
With Americans driving less because of the pandemic — and getting involved in fewer wrecks — two leaders in car insurance said Monday they are refunding a portion of policyholders’ premiums. Other companies are expected to do likewise.
Allstate said policyholders will get 15% of their premium back for April and May. The company said the payments, totaling more than $600 million, will be routed through a customer’s bank account, credit card or Allstate account over the next two months.
American Family said it will return about $200 million to customers as a $50 payment for each vehicle insured with the company. It said most households insure two vehicles with American Family, so the typical payment will be $100 and will come as checks within 60 days.
State Farm, the nation’s leading car insurer, said it is monitoring losses from claims and will decide how to respond this week. Jeff Sibel, a spokesman for Progressive, said the company is evaluating how to return some money to policyholders and will make an announcement soon.
If your car insurance provider isn’t one of the companies listed above, consider reaching out to inquire about refund availability. “It doesn’t surprise me that companies are doing this. I think others will be following suit,” said Kevin Martin, executive director of the Illinois Insurance Association, a trade group in Springfield.
Read the full story from David Roeder and Stephanie Zimmerman to learn more.
9:25 a.m. Northwestern Medicine rolls out app for parents to visit NICU babies virtually
As hospitals across Chicago shift their resources to accommodate more COVID-19 patients, and change their visitation policies to limit the potential spread of the virus, families of patients receiving hospital care unrelated to the coronavirus are struggling with limited access to their loved ones.
For parents of newborns staying in Prentice Women’s Hospital’s neonatal intensive care unit (NICU), that means having to decide whether mom or dad will visit their new baby — never both.
“It’s heartbreaking,” said Dr. Craig Garfield, a pediatrician at Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago, in a release.
Garfield and his colleagues at Prentice introduced an app in late March to Prentice’s NICU parents that aims to provide some consolation. The app, SMART NICU2HOME, was developed several years ago by Garfield and Young Seok Lee, an adjunct professor of medical social sciences at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.
The app sends parents updates throughout the day on their baby’s vital signs and notifies them who is caring for their baby at any given moment. It also features educational information, like translations of common NICU terminology.
— Lizzie Schiffman Tufano
8:05 a.m. Meet a coatimundi at virtual Brookfield Zoo
Brookfield Zoo has been closed since March 19, along with most attractions, and furloughed a third of its workforce Saturday (a move that has since been challenged by the workers’ union).
But the suburban zoo is one of many institutions offering virtual educational content for kids amid statewide school closures. Click here to see our full list of fun, virtual activities you can share with your kids from home.
The zoo will host a Facebook Live event at 11 a.m. Tuesday with zoo and wildlife medicine specialist Dr. Mike Adkesson during a routine exam of a coatimundi.
Click here for more things to do with your kids while self-quarantining at home.
7:07 a.m. Pritzker says PPE from China is going to private companies for state bidding war
Gov @GovPritzker confirms that the federal ‘Air Bridge’ flights from China, organized by the White House taskforce, are bringing PPE back from China which are then turned over to private companies. The states then have to bid against each other to purchase from those companies. pic.twitter.com/QG62dWtQuc
— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) April 7, 2020
President Donald Trump and Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker have been publicly sparring in recent weeks over the federal government’s role in helping the state source ventilators and personal protective equipment for its hospitals.
The issue came to a head at the Thursday White House coronavirus briefing, when Jared Kushner, the president’s senior adviser and son-in-law, said “The notion of the federal stockpile was it’s supposed to be our stockpile; it’s not supposed to be state stockpiles that they then use.”
The word “our” dramatized Trump’s view that addressing the need to procure ventilators, masks, gloves and other urgently needed items as COVID-19 cases surge was the main responsibility of governors, not the federal government or the Oval Office, Washington Bureau Chief Lynn Sweet wrote Sunday. The federal government is merely a back-up, Trump has been saying.
Pritzker appeared on PBS News Hour Monday to decry the federal government’s strategy for distributing the medical equipment, which he said has devolved into a bidding war between states.
“What the White House has done is created… they call this the ‘air bridge,’ where they’re bringing stuff back from China to the United States, and then they’re delivering it to private companies in the United States, not to the states, and they’re letting all of us bid against each other for those goods that are owned by the private companies.”
“So we’ve just gone around all that and gone directly to manufacturers wherever we could.”
The White House “promised PPE, and they said they’re delivering it to everybody — [a] small fraction, I mean, a small fraction of what’s been promised,” Pritzker said.
“I don’t like people who make promises and don’t deliver…But this is what President Trump has done to the country.”
Watch the full interview and read a transcript of Pritzker’s comments here.
New Cases
Analysis & Commentary
6:10 a.m. Why COVID-19 is raging through Chicago’s black neighborhoods — and what must be done
Monday brought another grim statistic about the coronavirus to Chicago: African Americans are catching the disease and dying from it at an alarmingly higher rate than the rest of us.
It is indeed, as Mayor Lori Lightfoot said, a “public health red alarm.” Seventy-two percent of those who have died of COVID-19 in Chicago as of Sunday were black, though the city’s African American population is only about 30 percent. More than half of those who had tested positive are black.
In Cook County, 58% of COVID-19 deaths as of last Friday were of African Americans, who make up just 23% of the county’s population, an analysis by WBEZ found. And in the entire state of Illinois, African Americans now account for 38% of confirmed cases of coronavirus and 41% of deaths, but only 14% of the population.
What’s going on here?
Nothing that should surprise anybody, disheartening as it is.
Health outcomes in the United States have never been fair and equal, not in Chicago or anywhere else. And there has never been health care equity. Black folks have always suffered from higher rates of dangerous medical conditions, such as hypertension and diabetes, that correlate with lower incomes and poorer health care.
