Mayor Lori Lightfoot said Monday morning the city of Chicago will be announcing the “repurposing” of empty hotel rooms as “isolation and quarantine spaces” for coronavirus patients.
Lightfoot also had a personal reflection: “I’m a black woman in America. I learned early on nobody was going to save me. I had to step up and make sure I took care of myself. And that is the approach that we’re taking in the city of Chicago.”
Lightfoot provided an update on city services in an interview with Stephanie Ruhle on MSNBC.
Also in the morning, Gov. J.B. Pritzker on NBC’s “Today Show” repeated his call for the federal government to take charge of acquiring personal protection equipment such as masks and gowns. His comments about the feds need to step up on Sunday drew the ire of President Donald Trump.
Sun-Times columnist Mark Brown forecast the city using hotel rooms to house the homeless in a recent column.
In the wake of Pritzker’s comments about Illinois running out of personal protection equipment, Ruhle asked Lightfoot, “How concerned are you about your hospitals having what they need?”
“Well, obviously, the governor was talking about the condition for the entire state. But what I can tell you is in Chicago, we’re holding firm,” Lightfoot said.
“We worry about these kinds of episodes all year long. So we consistently replenish our stockpile. We are working with our hospitals literally multiple times a day to get a sense of bed count, ICU beds, of ventilator space. So, so far, we’re fine.
“But what we are doing is we’re announcing this later today. We have stepped up to make sure that we’ve got additional capacity. We’ve gone to a number of hotels here in Chicago that are empty, and we’re repurposing those to make sure that we’ve got isolation and quarantine spaces. We’re looking at other resources in the community. So we make sure that our homeless population is taken care of. We’ve focused on health care, health care workers, first responders at our most vulnerable population. And if we focus on those, we are bringing a lot of resources to bear. So we are OK for now to ride this tide.
“But the governor is right. We need more help overall for the federal government.
PRITZKER ON THE TODAY SHOW
Pritzker: “We’re competing for ventilators with FEMA and the federal government. So Illinois is bidding for ventilators against the federal government. In another case, we were bidding against foreign countries and other states. And so what’s happening to not just on ventilators, but on all the PPE that we need? Prices are being ratcheted up, and we’re competing against each other on what should be a national crisis, where we should be coming together and the federal government should be leading.”
