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McCormick Place field hospital is now accepting COVID-19 patients
City officials confirmed Friday that the COVID-19 field hospital at McCormick Place has started accepting patients.
The so-called alternate care facility is being built to handle an overflow of patients from the city’s hospitals.
“The area hospital system is not at full capacity right now,” said Mary May, a city spokeswoman, in a statement.
“However, the ACF, as part of its preparation and training, did begin accepting patients from Chicago-area hospitals.”
She would not provide the number of patients at the facility, citing privacy issues. The statement did not say when the first patients arrived.
Three wings in McCormick Place are being retrofitted with hospital beds, tents and nursing stations to treat coronavirus patients. Each wing represents a different level of illness.
Authorities have said the facility is being built in stages, with up to 3,000 beds planned.
Mayor Lori Lightfoot and Gov. J.B. Pritzker were among the officials who toured the facility Friday.
— Frank Main
11:35 a.m. 4 die of coronavirus at Lincoln Park nursing home
A man and three women who live at a Lincoln Park nursing home died this week after contracting the coronavirus, a spokesman for the facility said Friday.
Ten more people at St. Mary’s Home, 2325 N. Lakewood Ave., have been diagnosed with the illness, said Sister Constance Veit, a spokeswoman for Little Sisters of the Poor, the organization that owns and operates the home. Six of the afflicted are residents, while another four are employees, Veit said.
“These are people who are not sick enough to require ICU level of care or ventilator support,” Veit said of the sickened residents. “The sisters are caring for them at home in their own rooms.”
The Lincoln Park facility has 76 licensed nursing beds and 50 independent-living apartments, Veit said.
11:02 a.m. 3rd CPD officer dies of COVID-19
A third Chicago Police officer has died of COVID-19, the department announced Friday.
The officer was assigned to the 4th District on the city’s South Side, according to Tom Ahern, a department spokesman.
His name and length of service with the department were not immediately disclosed, as the officer’s extended family was still being notified of his death Friday morning, Ahern said.
Mayor Lori Lightfoot and acting CPD Supt. David Brown were expected to release more details about the officer at a news conference Friday afternoon.
Read the full story from Sam Charles here.
9:43 a.m. Antiviral drug being tested at UChicago Medicine shows promise against COVID-19
As researchers race to find treatments for COVID-19, a new report appears to show that patients with severe symptoms who are participating in clinical trials at the University of Chicago Medicine have responded to a promising antiviral drug.
The early findings were detailed in a video obtained by Stat News that shows Kathleen Mullane, an infectious disease specialist helming the studies at U. of C., telling fellow faculty members that patients with fevers and respiratory symptoms had recovered quickly after being treated with Remdesivir.
As part of the trials at U. of C., 125 COVID-19 patients were treated with Remdesivir, 113 of whom had severe symptoms. Two of them have died, according to Mullane.
In the video, Mullane says most patients were being discharged from the hospital in less than a week. That’s notable because the study is investigating both five- and 10-day courses of the drug.
Read our full report about the Remdesivir clinical trials here.
8:15 a.m. Chicago COVID-19 survivors share their stories
As a Chicago firefighter, Paul Richard once climbed to the top of a 100-foot-tall crane to safely talk down a young man who was threatening to jump.
In the past week, Richard survived a different kind of ordeal — coming home after two weeks at Advocate Trinity Hospital on the South Side battling COVID-19. The virus attacked his kidneys, liver and immune system.
“Oh, brother, you better believe I was scared,” says Richard, who is now recovering at home in Beverly. “I didn’t know what was going on. It was like I was in a daze.”
His half-brother drove him to the hospital about two and a half weeks ago. That was after he’d been feeling so weak he barely could tie his shoes. It felt like a “little elephant” was sitting on his chest.
His memory of the time he spent in the hospital is foggy. At one point, he says he thought angels had appeared to him on the walls of his hospital room.
“I believe in God,” Richard says. “He’s saved me. And he’s still working with me.”
Read more first-person stories in the full feature from Stefano Esposito.
6:43 a.m. CPS teachers share what remote learning looks like
Rosa Jimenez-Hernandez didn’t know what to expect when she opened her laptop this week to remotely teach her fifth grade language arts class for the first time.
To her surprise, a dozen of her Sadlowski Elementary students were already logged on, waiting for their scheduled online video conference with their teacher. The next day, it was up to 15 kids.
But Jimenez-Hernandez wasn’t giving them a lecture or a typical lesson — it was scavenger hunt time. Her students ran around their homes for five minutes looking for items their teacher had listed.
“It’s not academic at all. It’s communication, it’s are you alive and well, and let’s have some fun together,” Jimenez-Hernandez said. “If they know that there’s going to be something fun going on, they’ll have more of a reason to join us.”
Like Jimenez-Hernandez, teachers all across the city are trying to come up with creative ways to keep kids engaged and overcome the challenges of teaching from home — including a massive technology deficit — as Chicago Public Schools’ remote learning plan rolls out.
“We’re all going to be behind,” Jimenez-Hernandez said, noting that she’s still trying to reach half her students. “And we’re just going to have to figure it out together.”
Read the full story from Nader Issa.
6:18 a.m. ‘I feel like I lost the battle for my husband,’ widow of dead Cook County Jail detainee says
Nickolas Lee was struggling to breathe, much less hold up his end of the conversation as he talked on the phone with his wife Saturday night from a Stroger Hospital bed.
“I told him a lot of people are beating this thing, and he was going to be one of them,” Cassandra Lee-Greer told her high school sweetheart.
The 42-year-old, who had been transferred to Stroger from the Cook County Jail just six days earlier, died Sunday morning.
Lee ended up in jail in February for a 2018 armed robbery — a case he thought he had a good shot of beating.
But in March, he noticed two detainees on his tier had the flu-like symptoms that sounded like what his wife had been telling him were telltale signs of an illness spreading across the globe. A few days later, he came down with a sore throat. Chills, muscle aches and a loss of sense of smell and taste followed. He tested positive for COVID-19. A week later, he was transported from the jail’s Cermak medical facility to Stroger, where he died of cardiac arrest likely caused by complications related to coronavirus.
He was the third Cook County Jail detainee to die after contracting COVID-19.
Reporter Andy Grimm has the full story.
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Analysis & Commentary
10:10 a.m. COVID-19 SBA loan funds exhausted: At Devon Bank, ‘applications with no place to go’
At a few minutes before 9 a.m. Chicago time on Thursday, an official with the Small Business Administration sent out an urgent email: “hitting limit in the next few mins,” said the message, obtained by the Chicago Sun-Times.
With funds appropriated by Congress exhausted, minutes later, the door slammed shut – for now – on the SBA accepting applications for two COVID-19 emergency loan packages. That’s the new Paycheck Protection Program — known as PPP — and existing Economic Injury Disaster Loans, both in enormous demand.
“It leaves us stuck,” said David Loundy, the chairman and CEO of the 75-year-old family-owned Devon Bank headquartered at 6445 N. Western Ave. with branches in Glenview and Wheeling.
These PPP loans for small businesses and nonprofits are urgently needed by employers to meet payrolls and remain viable until lockdowns are lifted.
Loundy said he had a backlog of 70 to 85 applications — asking for about $10 million in loans.
“They are applications with no place to go. These are people who just won’t get money. They represent small business operators; they represent sole practitioners; nonprofit organizations; religious organizations, across the board,” Loundy said.
Read the full story from Lynn Sweet here.
6:33 a.m. Let’s keep our foot on the gas against the coronavirus, Chicago — it’s working
The coronavirus stay-at-home order hasn’t been easy on Chicago. But we can’t let up — or the bug could come roaring back.
We know it’s tough to be indoors. We see the economy cratering. We see the jobs being lost.
Statewide on Thursday, there were some grim numbers, too: Health officials announced that another 125 people had died from the virus. That’s the highest number of COVID-19 deaths in Illinois in a single day. The state also reported 1,140 confirmed new cases, raising the total to 25,733. More than 1,000 Illinoisans have died in all.
Despite this, Gov. J.B. Pritzker for days has signaled some optimism based on the doubling rate of infections slowing down. And his stay-at-home order is slowing the spread of the virus in Chicago — flattening the curve — City Hall says.
Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s administration announced Wednesday that the city has seen 9,666 confirmed cases of the coronavirus cases and 347 COVID-19 deaths as of this week. But the city could have suffered more than 62,000 COVID-19 cases and 2,000 deaths by now had Pritzker not issued his order on March 21 and had the city not closed its parks and lakefront, officials say.
Read the full editorial from the Chicago Sun-Times Editorial Board here.
