8 states including Ohio added to ‘red’ category in Chicago’s travel quarantine order
More of the country will be under Chicago’s most severe category for its travel quarantine order, city officials announced Tuesday while bracing for a post-Thanksgiving surge.
The same 46 states and Puerto Rico remain under Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s travel quarantine order for those returning to Chicago, but as of Friday, eight of them will be bumped up to the “red” classification that mandates a two-week quarantine. Only travelers from Maine, Vermont and Hawaii have no additional safety requirements.
Those added to the red category on Friday will be Alaska, Colorado, Idaho, Nevada, New Mexico, Ohio, Oklahoma and Rhode Island. They will join Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota, Utah, Wisconsin and Wyoming to make a total of 19 red states.
Twenty-seven states plus Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico are in the next level, orange, while the lowest stage, yellow, has three states.
Chicagoans should still avoid travel to any of the red or orange states, public health Commissioner Dr. Allison Arwady reiterated in a Tuesday news conference. She had urged residents to avoid Thanksgiving travel and other traditional plans during her last travel order update two weeks ago, around when the city was seeing as many as one in 15 people with active COVID-19 infections.
As of this week, cases have gone down to just more than 1,700, and the test positivity rate has dipped from a peak of 16% last month to 11.6%, Arwady said Tuesday. She wants the first number to be under 400 and the second to be below 5%. As many as 1 in 19 Chicagoans have active COVID-19 right now, she said.
But given that not all residents heeded her Thanksgiving advice, the ramifications on future case numbers remains to be seen because of the wait time in reporting testing numbers, Arwady said.
“The risk for COVID here is high, and gathering remains unfortunately a high-risk activity,” Arwady said. “If you did travel for Thanksgiving, if you did gather, if you’ve let down your guard a little bit around COVID, now is the time to not be getting together with people in their 60s, 70s, 80s or with underlying conditions. Now is the time, especially, to not be gathering to not be having more potential spread of COVID.”
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Last month, the city revamped its travel order introduced during the Fourth of July weekend to instead require people coming from states with higher COVID-19 case rates than Chicago — now 70 cases per 100,000 residents — to quarantine for two weeks after getting to Chicago. The city isn’t enforcing this order, but Arwady has said the order was intended to educate residents about travel risks.
Those coming from orange states, with rates between 15-per-100,000 and 70-per-100,000, should get a negative COVID-19 test result no more than 72 hours before arriving or quarantine for two weeks. Those coming from the three yellow states must only observe regular social distancing and mask rules.
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