![]() Maybe someone who looks incredibly toxic and ill. You’re not quite sure what’s going to come in the door. So I told her, “No problem, let me take this one.” That’s when you start really thinking through the risks. And I could tell from a quick conversation that she was really concerned about going in to see this patient. I actually wasn’t working clinically that day, but one of my colleagues who had a very young child had just returned from maternity leave. We had practiced and trained around what we would do and made sure that everyone was appropriately outfitted with PPE. So I went down to the emergency department just to make sure the team was prepared. It was the first case at Rush where we said, “This has a really high likelihood of actually being COVID.” I received a notification before he landed that the parents wanted their son to be seen at Rush. The young man returning from Milan, Italy, had all the right symptoms, which he’d developed on the flight back. The hospital had a sanitation program where they would nuke them and give them back to you. If you could get your hands on an N95 mask, you would wear an N95. We had enough PAPRs, which are like battery packs you wear around your waist that filter air in and out, like in the movie E.T. We were trying to contain what we could, thinking that it was on skin, on clothes, and if you moved him it could go up in the air. The first patient, he sat out in his car at first, then they brought him through a decon room, with him and us in masks and plastic gowns. This is coming.” When we had that first case, because we were like, “Oh my God, it’s from contact, it’s droplets, it’s whatever,” we were masking patients, and sometimes we were wearing masks, because we weren’t sure who needed it and who didn’t. We were fully staffed at the time because we were like, “OK, we’re going to get hit. They didn’t really care much about how their directives were actually implemented, and we were pretty much on our own at the local level. I raised such a ruckus that I had my own little private phone briefing with them, where it was clear that they were trying to get me to be quiet and not make noise. They had no thought about how the directive was actually going to be carried out and what the impact was going to be on local authorities like us in Chicago. Those calls really gave me no confidence that the federal government had its act together. Who’s going to pay for this? Where are they going to quarantine?” Simple questions they had no answers for whatsoever. We were asking, “What if somebody comes off a plane from Wuhan but is asymptomatic and says, ‘No, I’m good?’ How are we to compel them to quarantine? Who’s going to be responsible for that? We don’t have local authority to do that. But they couldn’t answer basic questions. We started to ask a lot of questions to federal authorities to understand what this directive meant. ![]() This was just something that was done at the White House level. And it didn’t sound like HHS had really been involved. I learned that the CDC had not been involved. Now, one year later, as Chicagoans and millions of other Americans start to receive COVID vaccines, key government officials, public health leaders, physicians, and other early responders look back on the decisions made and actions taken during those critical early days of fear and uncertainty. It was all intended to lower infection transmission rates and “flatten the curve” so that Illinois, and especially the densely populated Chicago area, could avoid an overwhelming surge of outbreaks like the one in New York City, where refrigerated trucks were being used as makeshift morgues. Then, on March 20, came the governor’s shelter-in-place order, which would take effect the next day, severely restricting people’s movements. All businesses deemed nonessential were soon shuttered as well. By the time of Illinois’s first COVID-related death, on March 16, the situation had grown concerning enough to warrant an unprecedented statewide shutdown of indoor service at thousands of bars and restaurants. In the two months that followed, hundreds of new cases emerged in the state, most of them in and around Chicago. It was the first known case in Illinois and the second in the United States. Alexius Medical Center in Hoffman Estates, and 11 days later test results showed she had what would soon become known as COVID-19. ![]() Feeling unwell, she checked into Amita Health St. On January 13, 2020, a Chicago-area woman in her 60s touched down at O’Hare International Airport after visiting the city of Wuhan in east-central China.
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