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How hard will coronavirus shutdowns hit Illinois’ economy?
For weeks, Gov. J.B. Pritzker has been asked just how bad the state budget shortfall would be in light of a coronavirus outbreak that has devastated the nation’s economy and killed nearly a thousand people in Illinois alone.
On Wednesday — at Pritzker’s 38th consecutive daily coronavirus briefing — the Democratic governor unveiled the grim projections from his budget office: $2.7 billion less revenue than expected for the budget the state is currently operating under, and $4.6 billion less revenue for a budget plan for the fiscal year that begins on July 1.
With short-term borrowing to get through the pandemic, the total shortfall for that Fiscal Year 2021 budget would be $6.2 billion, when compared to a spending plan Pritzker released in February.
And the governor made a soft pitch for his pet graduated income tax proposal. His office says next year’s shortfall rises to $7.4 billion without it. Asked whether it’s time to abandon his No. 1 policy goal, Pritzker would only say he would argue we need it “now more than ever.”
Read the full story from Tina Sfondeles here.
News
6:44 a.m. As coronavirus cases rise, public health experts race to reach Latinos
A woman wearing a protective mask walks past a closed children’s clothing store in the Hispanic, Little Village in Chicago, Wednesday, April 15, 2020. The first U.S. economic indicators to capture the devastation brought on by the pandemic have begun to arrive, showing a plunge in retail sales exceeding what happened during the economic crisis a decade ago. AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast
Dr. Marina Del Rios has lost count of how many coronavirus myths she’s had to dispel on social media.
“I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to correct my own family on rumors flying around the internet about how if you do gargles with vinegar or lemon juice and baking soda, that somehow that’s going to protect your throat from the entry of the virus,” she said.
So when a Puerto Rican community group asked her to make a bilingual video about the virus, Del Rios, a professor of clinical emergency medicine at the University of Illinois at Chicago, quickly said yes — but hit a wall when looking for sources on COVID-19 in Spanish.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention “had plenty of information in English,” Del Rios said, “but when you look at the Spanish version of the website and click on a lot of those links, it takes you to a website that’s in English.”
Del Rios is a member of the Illinois Latino COVID-19 Initiative, a new collective of more than two dozen public health experts and elected officials racing to reach as many people in the state’s large Latino community before the virus spreads further.
Reporter Carlos Ballesteros has the full story.
New Cases
Analysis & Commentary
6:36 a.m. When farmers plow under crops in a nation of bounty, the tragedy of COVID-19 becomes all the more vivid
America has a food problem.
When, during this pandemic, we see dairy farmers dump milk into ditches and when we see vegetable farmers plow their crops back into the soil, it is tragically obvious that major agricultural markets have dried up.
It is an indication, as well, that our nation faces an unsettling new challenge in getting food to where it is needed most — one that the federal government needs to tackle immediately.
Chicago knows a lot about food. At our height in the last century, we shipped more than 80% of the nation’s meat supply from processing plants at the city’s stockyards. To this day, Illinois remains a key agricultural state that exports food globally.
But the systems needed to efficiently move food to market, especially perishables, take years to develop. Private companies are struggling to redesign them during the coronavirus pandemic, especially at a time when some of their own workers have fallen ill or are afraid to come to work.
Read the full editorial from the Chicago Sun-Times editorial board.
