Coronavirus Surge: Gov's Pseudoscience Creates Credibility Crisis

Mark Konkol
Updated ·6 min read

CHICAGO — It appears that relying on coronavirus pseudoscience has created a credibility crisis for Gov. J.B. Pritzker — just like the University of Chicago professor who advises his administration on controlling the spread of COVID-19 said it could.

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In a recent interview with the Belleville News Democrat, data scientist Sarah Cobey said the state's coronavirus metrics aren't based on "real science." She told Pritzker's people: "You're going to be losing scientific accuracy and probably credibility in the long run if you start using these other things."

And now, as positive coronavirus cases spike at an alarming rate, it seems Cobey's prophecy has come true.

MORE ON PATCH: Pritzker's COVID-19 Positivity Rate 'Not Scientifically Founded'

Pritzker's new executive orders forcing restaurants in four regions to stop serving indoors as a means to mitigate a rapid increase of coronavirus cases has unleashed a food fight with rebelling restaurateurs who refuse to comply.

On Thursday, Illinois Restaurant Association President Sam Toia declared the governor's "extreme measures" would devastate the dining industry, forcing at least 20 percent of restaurants to permanently close, and eliminating 120,000 jobs.

Toia said his group has "serious concerns over the consistency of the data the state is using to drive these devastating decisions to close our industry," citing DuPage County data that linked restaurants to just 6 percent of outbreaks in the last seven months.

"As the science surrounding COVID-19 has evolved, so must the metrics for mitigation," Toia said.


Personally, I'm not up for indoor dining or bellying up to a bar just yet. Pritkzer isn't lying when he says indoor dining can be risky. There actually are studies that says so. Besides, common sense says sitting next to an unmasked loudmouth at a bar isn't smart when everybody knows that a drunken guy's spittle could be a coronavirus spreader.

Still, I can't blame financially struggling restaurant owners who have worked hard to comply with coronavirus health regulations all summer long for pushing back against indoor-dining bans that could kill their businesses when there isn't definitive local data to show them proof that it works.

After all, White House coronavirus response coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx on Thursday said shutting down public spaces won't likely slow the second wave of coronavirus cases. Finding the "silent" and asymptomatic cases is critical to preventing the virus spread, Birx said.

That hasn't happened in Illinois.

There are, however, ways to fix that: increased contact tracing, testing and data transparency.

In the absence of a vaccine, contact tracing is believed to be the best way to control the spread of coronavirus. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, for example, credits contact tracing for his state's positivity rate of 1.2 percent of people tested. New York has more than six contact tracers for each daily positive case, public records show.

Pritzker's administration — despite promising in May to scale up a massive, high-tech contact-tracing collaborative — hasn't done nearly enough of it to control COVID-19's spread.

As of Oct. 15, the governor's office says Illinois had 3,097 contact tracers tracking the spread of COVID-19 in Illinois, which has hit nearly 5,000 cases per day.

That's a failing grade, according to Cameron Woodsum, co-founder of TestAndTrace, an all-volunteer organization that compiles data to inform public health leaders, politicians and regular folks why testing and tracing is vital to controlling the spread of COVID-19.

To do the job right, states need about 5 contact tracers for every daily positive case, according to TestAndTrace calculations.

"On a rough estimation, Illinois has enough tracers to track one out of every 10 cases. Obviously, from a commonsense perspective, their contact tracing is not very effective," Woodsum said.

"The big thing with contact tracing is if you want to stop an outbreak, you need to be testing really aggressively … enough to root those cases and find them, get all the people they came in contact with tested in an outbreak and isolated."

By TestAndTrace's calculations, Illinois is more than 17,000 contact tracers short of having enough to contain the virus spread as effectively as New York.

"If you don't have that, you're not going to fully know where positive cases are happening, whether it's in restaurants or gyms or big gatherings," Woodsum said.

When it comes to Illinois' regional coronavirus restrictions, the lack of localized data on where coronavirus cases occur casts doubt whether one-size-fits-all regional mandates hurts more than it helps.

New York's robust contact tracing effort now allows Gov. Cuomo's administration to analyze coronavirus outbreaks block by block — determining exactly where cases are coming from and which businesses or locations are not contributing to the virus's spread. That data-driven strategy is aimed at avoiding the "mistakes we made in the beginning of this, and lessens the economic impact on his state," Cuomo told New York 1.

Illinoisans should be so lucky.

Show Us The Data?

So far, Pritzker's administration has kept the public in the dark about his administration's contact tracing efforts. The public health department hasn't joined the 18 states that make contact tracing data available online. A spokeswoman told Patch the data would be available in coming weeks but wouldn't say when.

So far, the closest thing to public transparency might be a tweet from the governor's spokeswoman that got some Pritzker data deniers riled up on Twitter. One social media sleuth remarked that the link to a Google Doc with a vague chart of contact tracing data appeared to be "owned" by political gadfly Rich Miller of the Capitol Fax blog.


After I poked fun at the Twitter allegation that the governor's office cited a blogger's coronavirus data as a source, Miller posted a reasonable (but insult-riddled) explanation for the link to his politico echo chamber: The governor's talking head tweeted a link to Miller's Google Doc of the chart released by the state earlier this month.

It's the kind of stupid dispute that could be avoided if not for a persistent lack of public coronavirus data in Illinois.

And there's an easy remedy: transparency.

"In general, communication from health and government leaders during the pandemic has not been very good. There has been a lot of confusion on a lot of different topics," Woodsum told me. "The more transparency and accountability there is with the data, the better off we are as a society, and the better off each state is going to be."

Or, the way things are going in Illinois, worse.

Mark Konkol, recipient of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for local reporting, wrote and produced the Peabody Award-winning series, "Time: The Kalief Browder Story." He was a producer, writer and narrator for the "Chicagoland" docu-series on CNN, and a consulting producer on the Showtime documentary, "16 Shots."
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This article originally appeared on the Chicago Patch