Restaurant owners ask for proof that they are COVID-19 super spreaders (LIVE UPDATES)

Tyler
LaRiviere/Sun-Times

Here’s the latest news on how COVID-19 is impacting Chicago
and Illinois. Follow here for live updates.

Latest
If restaurants are COVID super spreaders, owners ask,
where’s the proof? Tyler
LaRiviere/Sun-Times Customers sit spaced out at the second floor
dining area at Roots Handmade, Friday, Oct. 23, 2020.

Scott Weiner, who runs 20 restaurants in Chicago, feels like a
scapegoat in a pandemic.

Like other operators, he sees a real possibility that the
city’s bars and restaurants may be forced to completely shut down
because of the rising number of COVID-19 cases. He’d also like to
see proof that his businesses, which include Roots Handmade Pizza
and West Town Bakery, are contributing to the problem.

“On top of poor data, you get the feeling people are making
decisions without really knowing,” said Weiner, co-owner of the
Fifty/50 Restaurant Group.

Government data are at the center of confusion about safety of
restaurants and bars as coronavirus cases are on the rise. On
Friday, a defensive Gov. J.B. Pritzker said “bars and restaurants
are super spreader locations,” a term that makes those in the
industry cringe because they say there is no conclusive proof.
Pritzker has shut down indoor restaurant dining in DuPage, Kane and
Will Counties as well as other parts of the state.

This week, the governor’s office provided a chart showing that
in August and September 2,300 confirmed coronavirus patients had
visited a restaurant or bar in the previous two weeks. While those
establishments make up the largest category of places visited by
those infected during that two-month period, the numbers don’t
definitively say that those people contracted the virus at a
specific bar or restaurant. State officials say one of the problems
in compiling data is how hard it is to trace infections back to an
exact location, an assertion also made by some local health
departments.

Read the full story here.

News 7:52 a.m. Land of tears:
‘Desperate’ Illinois health care workers ‘seeing history
repeat itself’

Ugly case numbers, busy hospitals, shuttering businesses,
mounting death tolls and a deadly virus traveling through the air
from face to maskless face.

Seven months into the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s beginning to
feel a lot like March again in the Land of Lincoln.

The state’s top doctor fought back tears Friday while making
her most impassioned plea yet for residents to follow basic health
guidelines as Illinois’ autumn coronavirus resurgence means many
front-line health care workers “are seeing history repeat
itself.”

“Excuse me, please,’ Illinois Public Health Director Dr.
Ngozi Ezike said, turning her back and pausing for nearly 40
seconds during the daily briefing, as Gov. J.B. Pritker and others
offered her tissues.

Ezike apologized when she resumed, acknowledging the difficulty
in running a race “when you can’t actually see the
endpoint.”

“If you’re talking about COVID fatigue from having to keep
wearing a mask, think about the COVID fatigue for health care
workers, respiratory therapists, who are going to have to go
through this whole episode again of trying to fight for people’s
lives, because we couldn’t figure out how to control this virus
by doing some of the simple measures that have been prescribed,”
Ezike said.

New Cases

Public health officials on Friday warned that half of all
counties in Illinois have reached a warning level for the
coronavirus as
3,874 more people tested positive for COVID-19 statewide.

Analysis & Commentary 7:55 a.m. The
simple math of ‘excess mortality’ — this pandemic
kills

Just how deadly is COVID-19?

The answer to that question should guide every decision our
nation makes as to how to keep ourselves and others safe, yet it
has proven maddeningly difficult to nail down and agree upon.

In part, the problem has been one of science. Estimated
mortality rates from COVID-19 have been revised, up and down, as
scientists and health professionals have collected and analyzed new
data and devised better medical treatments.

The problem has also been one of politics. From the very
beginning, there has been desire by many political leaders, mostly
on the right and most obviously President Trump, to downplay the
deadliness of the virus. They have found it more expedient to
denigrate the science of the disease than to take the bold measures
required — actions derided by anti-government conservatives and
libertarians — to slow and contain the spread of the disease.

The basic argument made by those who seek to minimize the
dangers of COVID-19 is that most people killed by the virus are
quite old and already quite sick and on the verge of death anyway.
And if a younger person who has the virus were to jump out of a
plane and his parachute failed to open, the skeptics joke, some
liberal doctor would record the cause of death as COVID-19.

Given this disagreement and doubt, it’s important to stress
that there is, in fact, an emerging gold standard for measuring the
deadliness of COVID-19 — something researchers call “excess
deaths.” And by that sturdy standard, according to a new study by
the Centers for Disease Control, the virus actually is more deadly
than most news reports would suggest.

That’s a profoundly important message, from what traditionally
has been one of our nation’s most trusted research institutions,
at a time when rates of COVID-19 are surging again in the United
States,
including in Illinois.

Read the full editorial here.

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