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

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

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If restaurants are COVID super spreaders, owners ask, where’s the proof?

Tyler LaRiviere/Sun-Times

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.