'No One Right Way' To Fight Virus, But Is Pritzker's Way Best?

Mark Konkol
Updated ·7 min read
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CHICAGO — When it comes to slowing the spread of coronavirus, there's no one way to do it.

That's according to the University of Chicago scientist hand-picked to deliver a soliloquy Thursday in hopes of dispelling growing distrust in metrics guiding Gov. J.B. Pritzker's pandemic response.

And Dr. Emily Landon is right.

[COMMENTARY]

There's the way the federal government handled the pandemic in a series of conflicting recommendations, questionable charts and strange — if not deadly — home remedy suggestions, among other things.

There's the New York method. Gov. Andrew Cuomo's administration responded with robust testing and contact tracing that led to the nation's lowest coronavirus test positivity rate, and the ability to roll out social distancing restrictions in clusters, block by block.

And there's the way that Illinois' governor, billionaire J.B. Pritzker, has handled the state's outbreak — guided by data from scientists under a gag order that's organized by political operatives, public records show.

MORE ON PATCH: Emails, Secret Report Show Politics Of Science Guiding Pritzker

For most of the pandemic, Pritzker has told us a single COVID-19 statistic guides his decisions to enact social distancing restrictions by executive order. That statistic is coronavirus positivity rates, which a secret report called "unreliable" and one of his epidemiologist advisers said are "not scientifically founded."

And thanks to emails and a confidential report sent to me by James F. Holderman III — executive director of Protect Parents' Rights, a group dedicated to defending a parent's right to be free from the "abuses of government and entities that collude with government"— Illinoisans got a peek behind the veil of secrecy that is Pritzker's administration.

On Thursday, Pritzker didn't address those public documents — or the public outrage.

Instead, he bypassed his own public health director and turned over his daily news briefing to Landon, a doctor who has been on call for delivering pandemic pep talks at Pritzker news conferences since March.

You might remember Dr. Landon, the soap-making epidemiologist from the University of Chicago, from her March 25 performance on Pritzker's coronavirus news conference.

A "message of hope to an anxious world," a YouTuber called it.

On Thursday, she made an encore appearance at Pritzker's daily coronavirus briefing at a time when the governor is facing a crisis of coronavirus data credibility.

Dr. Landon leaned on sympathy rather than science in an attempt to win over a chorus of folks around the state — Democrats and Republicans, mind you — who don't trust the statistic Pritzker cites for shutting down restaurants and canceling high school sports as the virus that never got contained in Illinois spikes with the change in seasons.

The doctor eyed a script, looking up only for dramatic effect.

Crossing her hands across her heart, she decried "misinformation and fatigue slipping into and covering up our best intentions."

Trust the governor and his bureaucrats, she pleaded.

"Everyone is trying to use the best information available to make the best, positive decisions. There are and will be disagreements about the details," Dr. Landon said.

She continued to read with inflection, waving a hand like a magic wand, as if her performance might convince skeptics who wonder why her world-renowned colleague, Dr. Sarah Cobey, publicly described the statistics used to guide the state's pandemic response as "not scientifically founded."

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

"There's no one measure of a metric but rather an understanding of the needs and the pain of the community both from the virus, as well as the consequence," she continued.

It was quite the moment of pandemic political theater, really.

Dr. Landon's argument that "inconsistent recommendations are not evidence of a conspiracy" landed like a thud with the community of folks — data geeks, academics and lawyers — at home crunching coronavirus statistics and scouring public records in search of one true thing that will prove Pritzker is a pandemic governor with no clothes.

Personally, I appreciate the acts of citizen journalism from Holderman, suburban accountant Erik Sheldon and others who send me data inconsistencies and shocking state secrets. (Keep it coming, folks.)

But they're also easily dismissed by Pritzker as Trump-following conspiracy theorists in tinfoil hats, as his protector, Dr. Landon actually suggested Thursday.

The proof of Pritzker's pandemic failure isn't just found in data and documents.

You can see the shortcomings of his approach by looking at how the governor's East Coast contemporaries have taken action.

While Pritzker issues pandemic executive orders leaning on "unreliable" metrics without much input from any elected officials — Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot included — other leaders, as Dr. Landon suggested, have found another way to do it.

A better way, at least, compared to coronavirus statistics in our state.

In New York, Cuomo, a Democrat, was early to embrace robust coronavirus testing searching for active COVID-19 infections and evidence of antibodies from folks who had recovered.

Massachusetts Republican Gov. Charlie Baker invested $44 million to hire virus hunters to identify clusters of COVID-19 as they popped up to slow the virus's spread.

And it seems to be working.

New York has the lowest coronavirus test positivity in the nation.

As of Tuesday, the seven-day rolling average coronavirus test positivity rate in Massachusetts was 1.6 percent, and the state rolled out a town-by-town risk assessment map.

Maybe that could have been us.

After all, emails show that Dr. Cobey and others gave Pritzker got the same scientific advice for tracking and slowing the pandemic that East Coast governors followed.

In May, Pritzker promised Illinoisans that he was going to follow the so-called "Massachusetts Model."

But the governor never delivered. And he still hasn't explained why.

On Thursday, Pritzker told reporters that enacting coronavirus restrictions in clusters — the method used in New York and Massachusetts — isn't doable in Illinois.

His reasoning was less than scientific. Nonsensical, even.

"Guess what, people move around," the governor said. "We have a very mobile society. People get out of their cars. Or they walk to places," he said. "Sometimes you cross a line. A city line. A county line. You might work in one place and live in another."

What happened to all that bragging Pritzker was doing about being a great pandemic leader during COVID-19's summer slowdown now that a second wave of coronavirus hit Illinois like a tsunami?

The governor's pandemic response never effectively evolved.

He continues to rely on the same economically devastating pandemic mitigations that shut down businesses and eviscerated working-class savings accounts.

MORE ON PATCH: Coronavirus Surge: Gov's Pseudoscience Creates Credibility Crisis

For that, some Illinoisans are pushing back.

The Illinois High School Association won't follow the governor's orders.

Some restaurateurs have openly revolted, the governor's threats of punishment be damned.
The Illinois Restaurant Industry is considering legal action against Pritzker's ban on indoor dining.

Even Lightfoot, for a brief moment, said she wanted Pritzker to find a different, more nuanced way to enact social distancing orders without shuttering more business and putting more people out of work and in Illinois' very long unemployment line.

But the governor insists on doing things his way.

Dr. Landon reminded us of that Tuesday.

"The governor gets to make the decisions. He's our elected official," she said. "He gets to find a way to balance all the different experts that are speaking in her ears. … There's no one right way to do it. We have to make choices and trade-offs, and that's why you get elected."

Dr. Landon turned to Pritzker, and giggled.

I did, too.

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