Coronavirus: North Siders Just Won't Get It Until They Get 'It'

CHICAGO — During a global pandemic, while under a statewide order to keep safe social distancing and stay at home, Lincoln Park denizens stalked the lakefront in packs.

Around 5:30 p.m. Wednesday — about three hours after Mayor Lori Lightfoot pleaded with them to go home and stay there — the North Siders shrugged.

The mayor couldn't have been clearer.

"This is an order that's enforceable by law. We're going to give you an admonition, and if you don't ... go home, we're going to give you a citation. And, if worse, we will take you into custody," Lightfoot said. "I hope that it doesn't come to that. I hope that I don't have to shut down the lakefront. Or shut down all the parks. But I will if we cannot get compliance. So today's the day to change your mindset."

Lightfoot's tough talk didn't work. Instead, North Siders met up by the lake on a warm spring afternoon after working six-figure gigs from the comfort of high-rent apartments, multimillion-dollar walk-ups and mansions to play soccer and toss the football around at North Avenue Beach.

Chicago's famous "Lakefront Liberals" ignored park district barricades blocking the way to a pedestrian tunnel, where a good sneeze from any coronavirus carrier could infect a half-dozen of them, who pass it on to two or three people each and so on and so on. You know, the chain of events that public health commissioner Dr. Allison Arwady, Chicago's voice of reason on all things COVID-19, refuses to stop warning us about.

Why won't Arwady quit talking about it? Well, it's not to scare you. COVID-19 isn't like measles, which is airborne and likely to infect everybody in a room.

It's not like Ebola, a more-lethal virus you can contract via a cut on your skin.

Arwady keeps telling everybody who can to stay home because the COVID-19 virus spreads like the flu, and people can pass it on before they feel sick. "One person with coronavirus spreads to between two and three other people if you don't have vaccination and you don't have social distancing," Arwardy said.

By now, we should all know that if we don't actively stay away from each other, there probably won't be enough hospital beds and ventilators in the city to save the most vulnerable Chicagoans.

That's why interim top cop Charlie Beck on Wednesday gave his officers orders to issue stay-at-home scofflaws one warning, then hand out $500 tickets. If that doesn't work, Beck told them, make arrests.

A few hours earlier, it seemed logical that Beck's instructions and the mayor's public threat to shut down every park in the city would be enough to inspire reluctant compliance from well-educated folks in posh neighborhoods. And maybe get them to understand that social distancing saves lives.

But after watching a bubbly lady run down the lakefront path toward a couple pals, her hugging arms outstretched, as police officers shooed people off the lakefront path, it seemed more than inevitable that some North Siders just won't get it until they get "it." The new coronavirus, that is.

Then, maybe they'll unwittingly pass it on to one of their less-affluent social acquaintances.

And a couple weeks later, somebody's South Side grandma will die.

Cause of death — a selfish stroll by the lake.

Mark Konkol, recipient of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for local reporting and Emmy-nominated producer, was a producer, writer and narrator for the "Chicagoland" docu-series on CNN. He was a consulting producer on the Showtime documentary, "16 Shots."

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