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Pritzker warns another COVID lockdown in Illinois could occur
With the resurgence of the coronavirus in neighboring states, Illinois Governor JB Pritzker says he reserves the right to order a new round of shutdowns.
CHICAGO – With the resurgence of the coronavirus in neighboring states, Illinois Governor JB Pritzker says he reserves the right to order a new round of shutdowns.
But the governor says if that happens it would be different from what he ordered last year.
Pritzker insists Illinois, especially the Chicago area, is still a long way from a new round of closures. If that happens though, Pritzker says it wouldn’t be as tilted as last year in favor of big box stores, as long as they had a corner devoted to selling groceries.
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“When you walk into a Walmart, besides being a grocery store, there are also other things you can buy. And so I think, certainly in retrospect now, I think what we’d say is, ‘if you could keep the appropriate capacity limit in a smaller location, it could have remained open, ”said Pritzker.
It could have saved at least some of the small retailers that went bankrupt in the previous emergency shutdown, which the governor said he ordered under federal guidance provided by the Centers for Disease Control.
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“But we were following, in a very unfamiliar environment, a new coronavirus – the federal government was basically telling us, ‘you have to keep these things open and you have to shut down the others,” Pritzker said.
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The governor said he was currently most concerned about rising rates of COVID-19 infection and hospitalization in counties in Illinois adjacent to Missouri.
“Missouri is… the worst state in the country right now,” Pritzker said. “And it’s right on our border. And (COVID-19) is pouring, unfortunately, across the border into Metro East and southern Illinois.”
Some Republican governors of states like Florida have explicitly ruled out another round of pandemic-related closures. Pritzker said he wouldn’t.
“You can’t say that. There were people last summer who thought we should rule out, you know, additional mitigation… and you saw what happened in October, November, December. . I mean it was worse than April and May. “
The governor is ready for a deadly battle over these pandemic-related issues, which is one of the main reasons he launched his re-election campaign on Monday, 16 months before the votes were counted in the general election of November 2022 for the governor.
Several of the governor’s potential Republican challengers have made his handling (they would say “mismanagement”) of the pandemic a key campaign theme.
The governor, whose personal fortune was estimated by Forbes magazine at $ 3.5 billion, is expected to spend at least as much as he did in 2018: $ 171.5 million.
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