Pritzker 'Optimism' About Coronavirus Testing Was Never Realistic

CHICAGO — Gov. J.B. Pritzker slyly admitted that his administration had neither the expertise nor the supplies to make good on a promises to quickly increase new coronavirus testing in poor neighborhoods where African Americans are dying at an alarming rate.

When asked Monday why daily coronavirus testing decreased in recent days despite his pledge to boost testing, Pritzker explained it was due to gubernatorial “optimism.”

As things turn out, Pritzker told reporters, it takes more than fancy Abbott Lab machines to test people for coronavirus.

“You need the machine and all the items it takes to get the specimen into the machine and, of course, to take the specimen,” he said.

“My optimism about testing has been that we have been able to obtain quantities — I wouldn’t call them an abundance — but we have been able to obtain more quantities of each of those items. And we have those, and then you have to distribute those to everyone who needs those and make sure they’re running tests.”

Just when I began to wonder why Pritzker’s optimism makes him sound like a guy who had no idea what he’s talking about, the governor kept talking and confirmed my fears.

“So all of that is a process that has really, never before been run by the state of Illinois. That’s usually run by commercial labs or individual hospitals,” Pritzker said.

“But now we’re having to get them all up and running and reporting and making sure we can collect all the data and make sure we are getting as many tests done as possible. That is my optimism about it.”

Apparently realizing that he didn’t answer the question, Pritzker restated the query and verbally shrugged.

“When you ask, ‘When will we see substantial changes?’ My staff knows that I’ve been pushing, pushing, pushing that all these sites are doing as much testing as possible and we got those tests run,” he said. “My hope is — I don’t want to promise any time frame — that we will see thousands more than you are seeing now.”

News conferences during a pandemic do not allow loud reporters to shout important follow-up questions such as: “What are you talking about, governor?”

And, “Why did a deputy governor put together a testing strategy that relies on a state public health department that’s never done this kind of thing before rather than pushing commercial labs, universities and hospitals that know what they’re doing to get the job done?”

Also, “Will you admit that this plan was rolled out to grab optimistic headlines before it was realistic?”

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Because the testing numbers don’t lie. According to the state public health department, Illinois’ coronavirus-testing system produced 5,040 results Monday.

Public health experts will tell you that the bulk of those tests are ordered by doctors and processed by hospitals, universities and commercial labs including Quest and LabCorp, which have increased testing capacity in response to the pandemic.

Monday's statewide testing total resulted in 826 fewer tests than the day before — and 1,130 fewer people tested than on April 10, when Pritzker promised to test more black people living on Chicago’s West and South Sides, according to the COVID Tracking Project.

Those numbers, unlike Pritzker’s political spin, don’t appear very optimistic. When confronted with questions about why that is, Pritzker’s go-to response has been to blame the federal government for his state’s testing struggles.

On Monday, after President Donald Trump shot back at Pritzker for not "understanding" the state’s capacity to conduct COVID-19 testing, the governor’s press secretary responded with a tweet: “We don’t watch @realDonaldTrump’s press conferences anymore because they are not a source of factual information.”

While the Pritzker administration seems to enjoy trading curt quips with Trump, the two are not dissimilar. Both are grandstanding, and the political blame game has become tiresome for Illinoisans who are now realizing that the governor’s news conferences also have resorted to selling the news media on “optimism” disguised as facts.

The state’s COVID-19 testing numbers are just one problem with Pritzker’s optimism-peddling promise that his administration claims will boost the state’s ability to track the spread of coronavirus cases.

Public health experts say the most important aspect of coronavirus testing is collecting data vital for identifying COVID-19 hot spots, tracking and containing spreading and, eventually, deciding if there are regions where stay-at-home restrictions crippling the economy can be rolled back.

Some community health centers Pritzker tapped to boost testing don’t have the administrative capacity to efficiently report the results to public health officials every day as required by federal law. Even well-staffed centers with experience testing for infectious diseases and that are participating in Pritzker’s testing system — Howard Brown Health, for instance — report testing results, including the age, race and location of infected patients, manually through a labor-intensive data-entry system.

“The state is helping us procure testing supplies, but what’s involved is greater than testing supplies. It’s infrastructure and capacity, and doing the reporting and administrative work. That infrastructure has more cost and complexity than just supplies,” Howard Brown CEO David Munar said.

“Not every [community health care center] will be able to absorb those duties or responsibilities.”

When I asked state public health director Dr. Ngozi Ezike about that, she said hospitals and commercial labs tasked with conducting the tests will report the results to public health officials.

Lab-reported test results, however, are typically limited to whether specimens they process are either positive or negative. Most labs don’t report important demographic data that experts need to track the virus’ spread, and advise elected officials considering lifting social-distancing restrictions, experts say.

Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot said the city’s public health department is concerned that some new testing sites fail to meet reporting mandates critical to the city's COVID-19 response.

“We need to have a much deeper testing capacity linked up to the public health system, and I emphasize that,” Lightfoot said Monday. “We’ve seen some of testing go up around the city, and they’re doing these drive-bys. But they’re not keeping great records, and that information is not being fed up into the public system so we know real-time what the impact is. That’s absolutely critical, and we’re going to put some controls around that.”

Lightfoot won't come right out and say it, but rest assured those new drive-by locations are part of Pritzker's optimism-based testing plan that was unrealistic from the start.

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."

More from Mark Konkol:

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• Pritzker Breaks Coronavirus Test Promise To Black Community
• Election Judge Hospitalized After Primary Dies Of Coronavirus
• Mayor's Haircut In Stay-At-Home Chicago, City Of Big Whiners
• Coronavirus Shutdown Gives Lightfoot Road Map To Chicago's Future
• My Sister The Nurse Is A Coronavirus Superhero Without Right Mask
• Coronavirus: Hey Wisconsin, Don't Make Illinois' Election Mistake
• Coronavirus: North Siders Just Won't Get It Until They Get 'It'
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