The City of Chicago issued a “shelter-in-place” order for anyone showing COVID-19 symptoms this noon, but Evanston officials so far have declined to take that step.
Oak Park issued a even broader shelter-in-place order Wednesday for all residents of that village.
Evanston Mayor Steve Hagerty and Health Director Ike Ogbo made no mention of a possible shelter-in-place order for Evanston during a late morning question-and-answer session on Facebook Live.
But they both urged residents to voluntarily do essentially the same thing — to stay home and avoid any unnecessary contact with people outside your household.
“This is not the time to have kids out in the park engaging in team sports and having close contact. It’s not the time for sleepovers and everything else,” the mayor said, urging residents to follow the guidelines established by the federal Centers for Disease Control.
Hagerty said that the condition of the two residents of the Three Crowns Park retirement community who were hospitalized after testing positive for the novel coronavirus disease has improved and that they “are coming home today.”
He said that given the limited availability of test kits for COVID-19, it wasn’t feasible to test all the residents at Three Crowns. But Ogbo said that once the Health Department heard about the cases, “We sprang into action,” reaching out to state officials to craft an appropriate response.
He said that contact tracing has been done to determine who else might have been exposed to the two individuals who fell ill and direct them to isolated themselves as approporate.
Quarantine
Other states and villages have ordered “shelter in place”, why does Illinois think that were exempt from a virus that’s killing people and spreading quickly. We need to be serious and stop letting businesses run our lives and allow us to take care of our own.