Metro East Lawmakers Urge Gov. Pritzker To Move Region To Tier 1

CBS St. Louis

January 29, 2021

Five Illinois lawmakers penned a letter to Gov. J.B. Pritzker urging him to move the Metro East to the next tier in the reopening plan. The next tier would allow indoor dining to return at a limited capacity and school sports practices to resume. The Metro East is the only Illinois region not in Tier 1.

The legislators sent this statement:

After months of uncertainty, financial distress and the devastating loss of many lives, a vaccine for COVID-19 provides some light at the end of the tunnel. As we move forward, the health and wellbeing of residents of our districts and across Illinois remain our top priority. We have been able to maintain a declining number of cases of COVID-19, however, our region remains the only in the state of Illinois to not move forward to Tier 1 mitigation efforts. We wrote to the Governor today to share our strong concern on the criteria being used that is holding our region back from moving to the next tier of mitigation, and effectively keeping many businesses, especially restaurants and bars in business. As of today, our region has met two out of the three required criteria to move forward a tier – including both a lower positivity rate of COVID-19 and hospitalizations. However, our region remains to be held back due to the number of available ICU beds – despite that number not being truly reflective of the actual situation for our region. As a border region in one of the largest metropolitan areas in the United States, the truth is many of our health care systems are located in Missouri, and residents utilize both hospitals and healthcare providers there, particularly in St. Louis. Therefore, there are many more hospital beds available regionally than reflected in the count of beds when limited to just Illinois, and the ICU hospital bed availability number fails to take this larger regional number into account.