Governor calls on school, health workers to be vaccinated
The statewide indoor mask mandate is back, and educators and health care professionals will be required to receive the COVID-19 vaccine by Sept. 5 or be subject to weekly - or even more frequent - testing, Gov. J.B. Pritzker said Thursday.
Beginning Monday, people will be required to wear masks in public indoor spaces, Pritzker announced.
The vaccine requirement, which goes into effect Sept. 5, will apply to "all P-12 teachers and staff, all higher education personnel, all higher education students, and health care workers in a variety of settings, such as hospitals, nursing homes, urgent care facilities and physician's offices," Pritzker said at a news conference in Chicago.
"Effective Sept. 5, individuals working in these settings who are unable or unwilling to receive their first dose of vaccine will be required to get tested for COVID-19 at least once a week, and IDPH and (the Illinois State Board of Education) may require more frequent testing in certain situations, like in an outbreak," he said.
Intensive care bed availability in southern Illinois is at 3%, officials said.
"The regions with the lowest vaccination rates are the regions where there are fewer hospitals, and lower hospital capacity," Pritzker said. "And those hospitals are sometimes the least well equipped to handle cases as they become more acute."
Perry County is considered by the IDPH to be one of the current COVID hot spots. According to the IDPH website, from Aug. 8 to Aug. 14 Perry County's rate of new cases was 609 per 100,000 (the target is 50 or less), and the positivity rate was 11.9%. This week, a man in his 50s died of COVID-19 in Perry County, bringing the total death rate to 67.
According to the Perry County Health Department on Thursday, there were 255 active cases.
Du Quoin Mayor Guy Alongi said Thursday he was surprised Pritzker didn't go a step farther, and require municipal workers to be vaccinated as well.
"I'm surprised he included some units of local government and left others out," Alongi said, referring to school districts.
Du Quoin District 300 Superintendent Matt Hickam doesn't know exactly how many teachers and staff are vaccinated. In the spring, about 60% of employees turned out to a vaccination clinic held at District 300 by the Perry County Health Department, but Hickam doesn't know how many have gotten vaccinated since.
He said he was told that about 75% of the high school staff got shots last spring, which means the level of vaccination in the grade school and middle school was probably in the 50% range.
Hickam said he knows some school personnel will not be happy that vaccination has been mandated. But as a positive, he sees this as more evidence that the state is not going to shut down schools.
"With the mask requirement and now the vaccine requirement, it looks like they are using these steps so schools remain open," Hickam said. "They understand the value of in-person learning," and also understand that remote learning falls short, he said.
Alongi said he has no intention now of mandating vaccinations for Du Quoin city employees, like officials in Chicago, Los Angeles and New York have done.
Still, "If I have 5 or 6 employees, or my whole police or fire department gets infected, maybe it's time to go back to the drawing board," he said.
So far, Alongi sees Du Quoin operating relatively normally. People are shopping, people are visiting restaurants.
"Is it taking a toll on local businesses? Not now, but with more mitigations some people won't feel safe and won't go out," he added.
Alongi, who is fully vaccinated, said he considers vaccination a personal choice. But he admits it is harder to keep a community safe when people won't get the shots.
"This Delta variant is running rampant," he said. "I'm not one to throw a stone at anybody, but ... you go to the doctor to get healed. If you don't want to listen to the doctor then don't go."
Illinois Department of Public Health Director Dr. Ngozi Ezike said the state is seeing 220 hospital admissions per day, a number on par with a surge in May. Pritzker said 98% of cases, 96% of hospitalizations and 95% of deaths since January have been among unvaccinated people.
"We are continuing to rely on experts at the (CDC and IDPH), but you don't need to be an epidemiologist to understand what's going on here," the governor said. "This is a pandemic of the unvaccinated."
The current vaccination rates - nearly 53% of the state's population is vaccinated - "are not enough to blunt the ferocity of the Delta variant," which has led to hospitals "again fighting the battle that we had hoped would be behind us by now."
Republicans, meanwhile, continue to call on the governor to further involve the General Assembly in his COVID-19 response.
House Republican Leader Jim Durkin, of Western Springs, shared a letter he sent to Pritzker on Monday, noting he got a call from the governor Wednesday night seeking input on a potential response amid the new COVID-19 wave.
"I will reiterate my plea on our call yesterday to please make your experts available to the General Assembly so that we can examine their data and plans, review the results of your many previous mandates and together plot a course of action that will work," Durkin said in the letter.
<i> Du Quoin Editor Renee Trappe contributed to this report.</i>