COVID-19 in Illinois updates: Heres whats happening this weekend – Chicago Tribune

The shift means the citys nonessential curfew has been lifted and bars and restaurants can now sit up to six guests at a table, according to City Hall.

But indoor dining and indoor events are limited to 25% capacity or 25 people per space. Establishments must stop serving alcohol at 11 p.m. and close for in-person service at midnight. Capacity for most other industries will remain at the lesser of 40% or 50 people, the city said.

Heres whats happening this weekend with COVID-19 in the Chicago area and Illinois:

The shift means the citys nonessential curfew has been lifted and bars and restaurants can now sit up to six guests at a table, according to City Hall.

But indoor dining and indoor events are limited to 25% capacity or 25 people per space. Establishments must stop serving alcohol at 11 p.m. and close for in-person service at midnight. Capacity for most other industries will remain at the lesser of 40% or 50 people, the city said.

Under state rules, Chicago had to reduce its test positivity rate to 6.5% or less for three consecutive days before it could use looser rules.

We continue to see great progress in the ongoing fight against COVID-19, and I am thrilled that our metrics continue to move in the right direction, Mayor Lori Lightfoot is quoted as saying in an emailed statement. However, while we welcomed the return of limited indoor service last weekend, a rush to expand capacity too quickly would be irresponsible.

The mayor noted that the number of coronavirus cases and positivity rates still are higher than before the second surge. Now is the time to keep safeguards in place to ensure continued progress and hopefully prevent any rollbacks in the future, she said in the statement.

Officials also reported 86,871 new tests in the last 24 hours. The seven-day statewide rolling positivity rate for cases as a share of total tests was 3.9% for the period ending Saturday.

As he welcomes people to a Loretto Hospital COVID testing tent on a windy, 21-degree morning, a shivering Johnathan Daniels knows one thing for certain: This was never the plan.

He never intended to be working a testing site in a Far West Side parking lot in the dead of winter, providing a free service to a neighborhood in dire need of it. He never envisioned himself recruiting people for medical trials or encouraging complete strangers to get vaccinated.

But when the pandemic hit, everything in Daniels world changed dramatically.

Without a comprehensive national strategy for battling the pandemic, safety net hospitals such as Loretto medical centers that accept all patients regardless of their insurance status or ability to pay have been forced to punch above their weight for nearly a year. And few at Loretto have stepped into ring with more enthusiasm than Daniels, a 25-year-old accounting department worker whose efforts have helped the hospital administer more than 22,000 COVID-19 tests in the past 10 months.

In addition to being involved with Lorettos COVID testing sites, he volunteered to lead the recruiting efforts for coronavirus treatment and vaccine trials. Hes also a member of the hospitals newly formed vaccination scheduling team, which makes appointments for the roughly 180 slots available to eligible members of the public each day.

Daniels juggles these virus-related responsibilities as part of a 15-hour work day that also includes his regular duties such as managing the medical centers social media and paying the hospitals bills on a razor-thin budget.

COVID is everyones job now, but not everyone reacted to this emergency the same way, said Loretto President and CEO George Miller, who recently named Daniels the hospitals 2020 employee of the year. Jonathan tries to help every department in the hospital. His energy, his teamwork, his willingness to help even when it has nothing to do with what he does is just so impressive.

Officials also reported 107,802 new tests in the last 24 hours. The seven-day statewide rolling positivity rate for cases as a share of total tests was 4.0% for the period ending Thursday.

In addition, the state has administered 57,292 vaccinations, according to a news release. IDPH also says a total of 945,137 vaccines have now been administered.

On the radio, at news conferences and in remarks to the Chicago Board of Education, Chicago Public Schools CEO Janice Jackson has belabored two points in recent days: Numerous studies show that schools can open safely under the right circumstances, even if educators are still waiting on COVID-19 vaccines, and the weeks since CPS welcomed back a small group of students prove that the districts mitigation strategies are working.

But the Chicago Teachers Union sees things differently, and if the parties dont land on an agreement soon, CTU members are preparing to strike if they are locked out of their online accounts for refusing to work in person.

While the district made some concessions in negotiations in recent days, the union is still not satisfied with plans for surveillance testing, vaccination availability and the health metrics that will guide future decisions about opening or closing schools.

With notable vaccine hesitancy and the reality that no matter how long Chicago waits to reopen schools, not everyone will have a vaccine, Jackson has asked: If not now, when?

Speaking on The Maze Jackson Show Friday, the CPS leader said that equity is what motivates her.

How do we make it better for Black children like myself who grew up in this school system? she said. ... Everybody is trying to claim this equity argument about reopening, and its actually pretty frustrating. At the end of the day, we know that our children need to be back in school.

American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten panned Mayor Lori Lightfoot Saturday morning for her Chicago Public Schools reopening plan the day after the mayor once again vowed in-person learning will reopen Monday for preschool to eighth-grade students despite the lack of a deal with the teachers union.

Weingarten appeared at a Chicago Teachers Union virtual rally about 10 a.m. and castigated Lightfoot for the instability parents and teachers in the nations third-largest public school district have experienced over the past few weeks.

When someone like the mayor says its really important to actually stabilize and nurture a community and have education in school for kids, then it means you have to have the wherewithal to do that, Weingarten said. This is not an either-or. This is your city. This is your lives. This means that if there is in school learning, we need to make it safe.

She cited the study released this week by researchers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention findings on how to safely return to in-person learning that both sides of the reopening debate have used to argue their point and implored, Why is the mayor not listening to the scientists? The city of Chicago should be listening.

CTU organized the virtual conference with politicians and labor leaders along with eight simultaneous car caravans that morning, according to a press release. The starting locations spanned from Simeon Career Academy High School in the Chatham neighborhood to Schurz High School in Old Irving Park.

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, the entire world suddenly experienced living in fear that death could come for a friend or family member. The fear of death is what Brian Wallach and Sandra Abrevaya had already been living with.

For the first time, he said, he saw the world understand what it was like to live with fear.

This is the moment where we can seize the opportunity to educate people and help them understand, he said.

The couple began the nonprofit after researching his diagnosis and realizing ALS is critically underfunded and under-researched, despite its brutal trajectory. With an average life expectancy of three to five years, many people dont live long enough for drugs under development to benefit them. Wallach waited more than two years to receive access to one experimental drug.

I AM ALS focuses on harnessing the power of patients and their caregivers, who share experiences, raise awareness and advocate for a cure. Last year, they celebrated the second-straight year that the Department of Defenses budget toward ALS research doubled, to $40 million for 2021, and the National Institutes for Health promised to invest $25 million over five years.

Through their volunteer network of patients and families, the groups website now offers a dashboard to help people find clinical trials. Volunteers also created a rating system to assess whether clinical trial designs are patient-friendly and brought that data to drug companies to ask them to adapt their designs. I AM ALS also launched a patient navigation system.

COVID-19 made clear, Wallach and Abrevaya said, that when there is political will there are ways to quickly inject funding toward a health challenge. Vaccines were created in a time frame that surprised experts; public health messaging became crucial to help people live safer lives.

Now, they said, its time to take that same urgency and funnel it toward diseases like ALS that kill people quickly.

Everything is on the line, and I hope people understand that now in a way that they might not have a year ago, Abrevaya said.

An emergency donation of $1.8 million to the Archdiocese of Chicago earlier this month from the nonprofit Big Shoulders Fund is helping to keep the doors open at West and South side Catholic schools with budgets hit hard by the COVID-19 pandemic, officials said Friday.

In addition, a separate group of donors has raised nearly $1.4 million to fund $250 teacher bonuses to reward and retain Catholic school educators who have been teaching students in person since the fall.

The injection of about $3.2 million in private funding arrives at a critical time for the archdiocese, which last week announced the closure of four of its schools, and the consolidations of dozens of parishes in the city and suburbs in part because of rising debt and declining enrollment.

Officials at the Big Shoulders Fund, a nonprofit that supports 72 of the highest-need Catholic schools in Chicago, said the $1.8 million emergency donation will help a significant number of schools at risk of closing because of financial hardships worsened during the pandemic. The recent donation is earmarked for 58 schools, according to archdiocese officials.

At the end of the day, these schools are community-based organizations in underserved neighborhoods, said Big Shoulders President and CEO Josh Hale.

Our kids and our teachers have done a heroic job throughout the pandemic, and I think when we look back at this part of our history, well be able to say they succeeded enormously, Hale added.

In a city with a grocery store on almost every block, the bright green lights that frame Dill Pickle Food Co-Op Market & Deli shine on a steady flow of neighbors turned loyal customers.

The only operating grocery food cooperative in the city, Logan Squares Dill Pickle is a community-owned store run by its members.

While customers say the Dill Pickle is a fixture in the Logan Square food economy, residents around the region from Rogers Park to Lombard to Woodstock are in different stages of trying to launch three other food co-ops.

There is an outcry for a different system and way of supporting communities, said Jillian Jason, who is part of an effort to start a co-op in Rogers Park. Its a different model of business. Instead of focusing on the growth, a co-op is tailored on the community and focused on supporting people.

Interest in these kinds of operations increases in turbulent times, experts say. Shopping habits are evolving as residents deal with quarantine boredom, and the desire for fancy cheeses and small-batch microbrews.

The pandemic has also benefited some of these small, locally sourced co-ops that can react more nimbly to interruptions in the food supply.

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COVID-19 in Illinois updates: Heres whats happening this weekend - Chicago Tribune