Pritzker Brags As Coronavirus Testing In Minority Enclaves Lags

CHICAGO — There's been a surge in confirmed coronavirus infections and deaths among Hispanics. The number of cases hasn't peaked. The curve isn't flattening, and it won't anytime soon.

Gov. J.B. Pritzker used his daily pandemic update Wednesday to clarify a few things. The governor said his administration already has responded with "several measures designed to mitigate the impact of the pandemic in Illinois' Latino communities."

Pritzker claimed he has "prioritized establishing testing partnerships" focusing on communities with "significant populations who are more vulnerable to COVID-19."

He boasted that 66 of the 200 testing sites statewide are in communities with more than 17 percent Latino population, and some staff at the state's seven drive-up testing sites speak Spanish.

And reporters wrote about it as if those unchecked assertions actually added up.

The truth about Pritzker's spin on those 66 testing centers in Latino communities is that some community health centers his administration has tapped to administer COVID-19 tests aren't accessible to as many people as you might think.

Esperanza Health Centers, for instance.

At a city of Chicago news conference Wednesday, Esperanza CEO Carmen Vergara said 2,000 people have been tested at four South Side locations since March 14.

Even after ramping up testing in recent weeks — 150 tests a day, she said —that's an average of nine tests per day at each location since testing began. Anybody who calls to ask about testing at Esperanza in the Latino neighborhood of Brighton Park, as I did, quickly learns that only existing patients qualify. Everybody else is out of luck.

Take a look at the state's COVID-19 testing location map and you'll see the gaping hole in the governor's claims that the increase in testing (which he has asserted control over) addresses the needs of minority communities hit hardest by the pandemic.

There isn't a single COVID-19 testing location in the mostly minority neighborhoods between Halsted and Cicero from the Stevenson Expressway to 95th Street.

The absence of testing in neighborhoods where people rely on public transportation to get around is a detail that Pritzker doesn't bring up when defending the "significant" increase in COVID-19 testing for which he takes all the credit.

"If the governor doesn't know about the Latinos living along Archer Avenue, then I don't know what to tell him," Southwest Side Ald. Ray Lopez said.

"Look at the map. Where do you see testing sites? Downtown clusters. Hyde Park clusters. Beyond that, there's no testing clusters for Latinos. There's no cluster in Englewood. There's no cluster in Chinatown. He's leaving immigrant, Latino and African-American communities out of the equation and continuing to congratulate himself on flattening the curve, and saying, 'Look at all the great things we've done for you poor people who can't get tested.'"

Latinos who do get tested for the coronavirus have positive results 61 percent of the time, according to the COVID Tracking Project.

Pritzker blamed that disproportionate testing result on "decades of institutional inequities and obstacles" for the Latino community.

“While we can’t fix generations of history in the span of a few months, we must advance equity in our public health response everywhere and anywhere we can," Pritzker said. “The Latino community is the Illinois community. We are in these fights, all of these fights, together.”

But what Pritzker doesn’t say is that 81 percent of white people who get a precious swab jammed up their nose test negative for COVID-19, a statistic that seems to suggest the state could probably do a better job of targeting where to test and trace spread of the virus among people who need it more.

"This is what happens when you have a governor dictating orders from on high with no connections to minority neighborhoods," Lopez said. "Any leader who says, 'Yes, your community has been disenfranchised and underserved, but take the bilingual operator I put three miles from your neighborhood, that's good enough to make up for it,' that's not right."

There's no getting around the stats, as WBEZ most recently reported: Hispanic enclaves with the highest percentage of confirmed COVID-19 cases in Cook County severely lag in testing.

One of the reasons Pritzker isn’t being pressed on those details is a nagging problem reporters have getting straight answers from elected officials during the pandemic.

Written queries read by pool reporters and mute buttons controlled by government spokespeople prohibit needed follow-up questions at virtual news conferences when politicians dodge questions.

Too often, reporters waste limited time asking over and over about unimportant things, such as: Will Lollapalooza be canceled?

While the governor's empty assurances get transcribed and reprinted, elected officials in black and brown communities, such as state Sen. Jacqueline Collins, haven't been able to get as much attention from Pritzker's administration and reporters.

On Wednesday afternoon, Collins was still waiting to hear if the governor would commit to locating a testing site in Auburn Gresham, an African-American enclave with terribly high rates of infections and deaths and not a single testing site for miles.

The senator asked me to try to get a question directly to Pritzker at his pandemic TV show about whether he's going to respond or if she should go ahead with protests.

"Maybe you could shine a little light directly on the governor about Auburn Gresham," Collins said.

I tried, but Pritzker's unresponsive spin machine cut the press conference short. The governor's six-figure spokeswoman, Jordan Abudayyeh, didn't reply when I tweeted the senator's question publicly, either.

Meanwhile, for weeks, African American and Latino essential workers on the front lines of our economy still don't have equitable access to the testing that public health experts say is the only way we'll be able to slow the spread of the virus in hot spots that pock Chicago's neglected minority neighborhoods.

What they do have is an important unanswered question.

What are you going to do about it, governor?

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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