chicagotribune--2020-11-16--Column: Voter fraud is fake. Voter suppression is real.

When she returned to Broward , she was told again that she could not vote .
However , she noticed @ @ @ @ @ whose name also wasn ’ t on the rolls was allowed to fill out an @ @ @ @ @ asked if she could do the same , and they told her no .
She @ @ @ @ @ her ballot .

People stand in lines on the last day of early voting in Lake Worth, Florida, on Nov. 1, 2020. (Saul Martinez/The New York Times)
America is long overdue for a serious conversation about disenfranchised voters.
But let’s be clear. There is a big difference between voter fraud and voter suppression. Voter fraud is fake. Voter suppression is real.
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The people who poured into the streets of Washington, D.C., Saturday to protest the election they say was stolen from Donald Trump are reacting to a fantasy based on lies. Voter fraud is a myth created by Republicans who refuse to accept defeat.
The reason no one can come up with legitimate cases of widespread voter fraud is because they do not exist. Such theories have been debunked in studies by several academic institutions, including the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University and Arizona State University.
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Purging names from the rolls, denying people access to ballots and forcing voters to wait in line for hours, however — that’s real. It is designed to dilute the vote of Black and brown people. It is deliberate and systemic.
No election is perfect. So sure, a few illegalities might have occurred at one polling place or another this time, but certainly not enough to overturn the election.
Overall, the November election was one of the smoothest ever across the country, according the Election Assistance Commission, a bipartisan agency charged with ensuring secure and accurate elections.
The reason, the agency said, is because 107 million people voted early, either in person or by mail. That helped take the pressure off the polling places, resulting in fewer opportunities for things to go wrong.
It’s laughable to hear Republicans complain about being disenfranchised. They’ve been disenfranchising Black voters for decades, either by directly setting up barriers or refusing to address voting issues that have long been known.
The push to throw out mail-in ballots they deem as “illegal” is the GOP’s latest attempt at voter suppression. If Trump were to prevail, millions of Black voters in Philadelphia, Atlanta, Milwaukee and Detroit would be disenfranchised.
Let’s talk about what real disenfranchisement looks like.
In the aftermath of the 2000 presidential election, the U. S. Commission on Civil Rights set out to bring the long-standing disenfranchisement issue to light and address it on a national scale.
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During three days of hearings across Florida, the commission collected more than 30 hours of testimony from more than 100 witnesses under oath and reviewed more than 118,000 pages of documents. These accounts are from those documents.
Black people were turned away at the polls for various reasons in 2000. One poll worker said his precinct workers turned away 30 to 50 potential voters because they could not get through to the supervisor of elections on the phone to confirm their eligibility.
Haitian Americans, who spoke limited English, said they were not given proper voting instructions. Others said their names were wrongly removed from the voting rolls.
Voters who requested absentee ballots never received them. Some were denied ballots at their polling places because the election records incorrectly indicated that they had been sent absentee ballots. And some voters said they received absentee ballots even though they never requested them.
Some said they arrived at their designated polling place only to discover their precincts were no longer being used or had moved to another location without notice. In other instances, voters who had been standing in line to vote at their precincts prior to closing were told that they could not vote because the poll was closed.
In addition, thousands of voters who had registered at motor vehicle licensing offices were not on the rolls when they came to vote. The commission also heard from several voters who saw Florida Highway Patrol troopers in and around polling places, while other troopers conducted an unauthorized vehicle checkpoint within a few miles of a polling place in a predominantly African American neighborhood.
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After years of complaining about being denied their constitutional rights, Black voters finally were being heard. The following incidents are from the transcripts.
Cathy Jackson registered to vote in Broward County in 1996, after moving there from Miami-Dade County. When she arrived at her precinct, poll workers said that her name was not on the list and told her to go back to her old precinct in Miami-Dade. She went there, and they told her to go back to Broward.
When she returned to Broward, she was told again that she could not vote. However, she noticed that an elderly white man whose name also wasn’t on the rolls was allowed to fill out an affidavit and vote. She asked if she could do the same, and they told her no. She was never allowed to cast her ballot.
When Lavonna Lewis, a first-time voter, arrived at her polling place, a white poll worker standing outside told her that the poll was closed. As she turned to leave, the poll worker allowed a white man to walk in and get in line to vote.
Felix Boyle described his polling place in Miami-Dade as a “medieval labyrinth.” There were “sulfuric odors from standing water, orange cones, barriers, deep pits, broken concrete. It was a real problem getting there.” As a result, he said, the polling place was “deserted” on Election Day.
The commission concluded that there were problems in nine of the 10 counties with the highest percentages of African Americans. These problems, the commission said, were “serious and not isolated.”
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“In many cases, they were foreseeable and should have been prevented,” the commission said. “The failure to do so resulted in an extraordinarily high and inexcusable level of disenfranchisement, with a significantly disproportionate impact on African American voters.”
The NAACP filed a lawsuit against the Florida secretary of state’s office, alleging violation of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Unlike Trump, however, the NAACP wasn’t trying to overturn the election. It was seeking remedies for voter suppression.
As a result, the Florida state legislature took steps to address some of the issues — but not all of them.
Across the country, the GOP took it to heart — not to make sure such travesties never happened again anywhere in America. Its goal was to figure out what worked best and implement those suppression tools all over the country.
To this day, Republicans are still trying to perfect it.
dglanton@chicagotribune.com
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Twitter @dahleeng


chicagotribune--2020-11-16--Chicago considers changes to emergency mental-health response as recent police cases highlight the i

Chicago considers changes to emergency mental-health response as recent police cases highlight the issue

“ CPD ’ s documentation of these incidents is often insufficient to determine whether the force was necessary , appropriate @ @ @ @ @ reads a 2017 report from the U.S. Department of Justice that investigated the Chicago Police @ @ @ @ @ the shooting of teenager Laquan McDonald .
`` Consequently , all we know are the @ @ @ @ @ events — that officers used force against people in crisis who needed help .
”

By the time police got to the apartment building earlier this month on South Burley Avenue, the situation was already escalating.
An anxious Patricia Bulmer stood outside as her 26-year-old daughter, who was upstairs in their apartment, threw things out a window at the officers.
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Things could get ugly, the mother had told a 911 operator, repeating the warning to the officers as they tried to reason with her daughter.
Several minutes later, the younger woman emerged — brandishing two knives. Standing on the front porch, she cursed at the officers and slashed into her own legs before charging them.
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The cops had to deploy a Taser multiple times to subdue her. In the melee, one of them, who was trained in crisis intervention, was stabbed in the stomach.
The scene on Burley had a better outcome than many similar cases, considering how many mental health calls for police end in tragic deaths. According to national estimates, 1 in 4 police encounters involve people with mental health concerns.
And yet the result — a person in crisis being tased and sent to Cook County Jail — is far from ideal, according to experts, community mental health advocates and, of course, the young woman’s mother.
“It’s horrible. It really is. You know, and especially to witness all of that," Bulmer said in an interview with the Tribune. She also said a call to police is a harrowing decision when her daughter is in crisis.
“You don’t know if they are going to come down off that level," she said of people experiencing a crisis like her daughter was. "You do call 911, there’s probably a (good chance) that it’s going to get combative, and that’s the ugly part about it.”
Police response to mental health calls has been the subject of intense debate and organizing in recent months in Chicago amid the national conversation over policing and police abuse, including the high-profile in-custody deaths of people who were experiencing a mental health crisis.
Chicagoan Daniel Prude, who had a history of mental illness, died in Rochester, New York, while visiting relatives after police there confronted him on a street, wrapped a hood over his head and pushed his face to the pavement.
To many, police simply are not suited to handle calls of people experiencing mental health-related distress, arguing their very presence, with sirens, flashing lights and guns, can increase anxiety and tension. In communities of color, the concern over how police will respond to a person in crisis is even greater, considering the long-standing mistrust minority communities have for officers and the fact that recent high-profile police-abuse deaths have involved Black victims.
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A possible new direction
A group of aldermen and community activists are now calling for a plan to remove police from non-life-threatening mental health calls altogether by creating a dedicated emergency line that would dispatch a paramedic and a clinician instead.
And just this month, the Chicago Department of Public Health outlined its own idea: a $1.4 million plan to create three-person teams of clinicians, cops and paramedics to respond together to mental health calls, a concept that has been used in other cities for years. The plan, as outlined by the department’s director, Dr. Allison Arwady, at a city budget hearing, would be piloted in two police districts next year.
While Arwady called the plan a significant shift in crisis response for the city, she faced pushback from aldermen at the hearing as they questioned why law enforcement had to be part of the team at all, considering how often police have used excessive force and how much credibility they’ve lost in some Chicago neighborhoods.
“I think what we are talking about now, in terms of a co-responder, doesn’t do enough,” Ald. Rossana Rodriguez Sanchez, 33rd, said at the budget hearing. "I think it’s an emergency to get police out of the mental health response.”
Another troubling case
On the morning after Christmas in 2015, Quintonio LeGrier, a 19-year-old engineering student, called Chicago’s 911 center three times for help.
“I need to talk to an officer,” he told a dispatcher in the first call. “Someone’s threatening my life."
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The emergency operator hung up on LeGrier when he failed to provide his full name.
Police showed up anyway after LeGrier’s father called to report his son was menacing him with a bat. When Officer Robert Rialmo reached the porch steps, LeGrier was there with the bat and Rialmo fired, later claiming the teen was swinging it at him.
LeGrier and his downstairs neighbor, Bettie Jones, were killed in the gunfire. Rialmo was later fired, and 911 operators faced discipline. The shooting became another example of a failed response to mental health calls.
“CPD’s documentation of these incidents is often insufficient to determine whether the force was necessary, appropriate, or lawful,” reads a 2017 report from the U.S. Department of Justice that investigated the Chicago Police Department in the wake of the shooting of teenager Laquan McDonald. "Consequently, all we know are the broad contours of terribly sad events — that officers used force against people in crisis who needed help.”
In the aftermath, the city announced new training at the 911 center and that it would increase the number of officers certified for a Crisis Intervention Team, a long-standing and well-regarded program that trains officers on de-escalation techniques and how to recognize symptoms of a mental health crisis.
Today, 3,100 Chicago officers are CIT-trained, nearly a quarter of the department.
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The unit has also partnered with city mental health organizations so that officers can make referrals after responding to calls — the kind of referral that apparently was made after Patricia Bulmer’s daughter was tased and arrested. Bulmer said she got a phone call from a Chicago-based mental health organization.
But experts said CIT training by itself is not the answer to improving response to people having mental health incidents. Studies have shown that training does help officers change their attitudes, use more de-escalation and connect people to services, but there needs to be a fundamental shift away from continuing to let police policy alone drive responses.
That’s especially true when it comes to mental health, said University of Wisconsin professor Amy Watson, who has studied training in Chicago and police mental-health response nationally.
“It’s exciting to see there a possibility that we really can develop more on the mental health side," Watson said. “You can train officers, you can get people who are really good at mental health response, but in the end, they are still police.”
Carmen Orozco, 44, from left, Dalia Godinez, 35, and Estela Diaz, 41, stretch and warm up as they gather with others to walk around McKinley Park in Chicago on Oct. 6, 2020. The group does early morning walks to help improve neighborhood mental health. (Jose M. Osorio / Chicago Tribune)
Alternate emergency line?
The women laughed and chatted in darkness at McKinley Park, the moon still bright overhead as they stretched hamstrings on the steps of the field house.
It was 6 a.m. on a Tuesday in early October. Carmen Orozco was leading neighbors from the Southwest Side on a walk around McKinley, a sprawling park of ball fields, tennis courts and a prairie path that snakes along a large lagoon.
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Orozco, 44, and other community health promoters at the Brighton Park Neighborhood Council do outreach on a variety of health concerns, such as asthma to diabetes.
These days, mental health is a big worry. City neighborhoods had already lost community mental health clinics. And now the pandemic has added stress, including economic worry, to many homes, as has the closure of schools as parents are trying to manage remote learning. The early morning walks aimed to help relieve stress.
The women take pride that they have been able to connect with neighbors, who now call them for help — like a mother who called Orozco recently about her despondent teenager. What they struggle with is finding help.
Calling 911 is not always an option, especially since some families fear police because of immigration concerns.
“I have been able to gain the trust of the people," Orozco said. "(But) I feel powerless because I do not have a safe, accessible tool. I do not have anywhere to turn.”
Orozco and other health workers want to see more investment in the community by hiring more culturally competent and bilingual counselors and reopening the shuttered clinics.
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What they said they don’t need is more police, which is why Orozco and others back a plan put forward by Ald. Rodriguez Sanchez and others for a separate emergency line that sends responders who are not police officers to mental health calls.
Brisneida Gabriel, 35, from left, Carmen Orozco, 44, and Dalia Godinez, 35, walk around McKinley Park in Chicago on Oct. 6, 2020. The group meets for both mental and physical health. (Jose M. Osorio / Chicago Tribune)
“Face it,” Estela Diaz, 41, said matter-of-factly as the women briskly bounded around the north side of the park. “Police are not prepared for a crisis of mental health. … When you are in that situation and crying for help, you need somebody to listen to you, not medicate you, tackle you to the floor.”
Modeling their effort after a plan in Eugene, Oregon, Rodriguez Sanchez and the City Council’s progressive caucus are calling for the Department of Public Health to establish mobile crisis teams of a paramedic and a nurse or social worker that could be dispatched from community clinics on a 24-hour basis. The new emergency phone line would be established for residents to call for help with nonviolent incidents, supporters of the plan said.
Estela Diaz, from left, Blanca Ortiz and Brenda Magana, walk around McKinley Park in Chicago on Oct. 6, 2020. (Jose M. Osorio / Chicago Tribune)
The response could possibly weave in health workers like Diaz and Orozco, who are "connected to the fabric of community,” said Arturo Carrillo, director violence prevention and health initiatives at the Brighton Park Neighborhood Council.
“We would actually love to see the expansion of the community crisis response units to include peer advocates,” said Carrillo.
Police remain in city plans
For now, at least, it seems that the city is poised to keep Chicago police as part of its response to mental health-related calls.
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Under the plan, starting in 2021, two teams would be assigned to two police districts, based on calls for mental health service. The teams would travel in unmarked vehicles that have medical supplies, and would include a mental health professional, a paramedic and a CIT-trained officer.
Arwady, speaking at the budget hearing, told aldermen that after surveying eight police departments, including ones in other large cities, Chicago concluded that it would be better establish a police co-responder unit first so those teams can gain a better understanding and collect data about the mental health calls in the city.
The teams, with a police officer present, would also be able to respond to any type of call — including those that are violent.
Meanwhile, Carrillo, of the Brighton Park Neighborhood Council, said there are other cities that have rolled out response teams that do not include police even as they plan to launch teams that might eventually include officers.
Chicago Public Health Department Deputy Commissioner Matt Richards stressed that that the co-responder teams are just one part of a larger push to get mental health services into the community and to reach people in crisis more directly.
The department will continue to invest in current services that bring mental health clinicians to places like homeless shelters. And the $1.4 million city plan would, in addition to creating the teams, pay for clinicians to work in the 911 center to assist with calls that have a crisis component.
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“This is the first time we are weaving mental health into crisis response," Richards said. “All of this together amounts to a coordinated strategy.”
Ald. Rodriguez Sanchez, reached by the Tribune Sunday, said talks were continuing with the city late last week to consider whether both ideas could be launched at the same time.
A mother’s worry
As painful as it was for Patricia Bulmer to watch police physically subdue her daughter, who goes by the name Ariel, Bulmer said she does not regret seeking help from police.
Bulmer said her daughter was first diagnosed about 10 years ago with mental illness, had knives and was harming herself. Bulmer said her daughter, who was charged with battering an officer, identifies as a woman. The charges were filed under her prior name, Francisco Bulmer.
Police said they understood the challenges such calls pose.
“We deeply understand that police officers should not be the sole response to mental health crises but dangers like these are exactly why the City is establishing a co-responder model that partners mental health professionals with CIT-trained police officers so that we ensure the safety of all individuals,” Chicago police officials said in a statement.
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Still, the scene that unfolded on her block was surreal, Bulmer said. The tasing. The surge of police who surrounded her daughter after the confrontation. She watched in fear as one drew their gun.
Like the experts and advocates, Bulmer, who works in the health care field, agrees that fixing the problem is complex.
There are times, she explained, that her daughter starts to get agitated and seems to need help — but not from the police. So a nonemergency line or a softened response seem like good options to her.
But so does a health care system that supports people before they are in crisis. Leading up to that night, her daughter had slipped from therapy and then stopped taking her meds because she didn’t have a prescription.
“She gave up on the system,” Bulmer said.
The Tribune’s Abel Uribe contributed.
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asweeney@chicagotribune.com
jgorner@chicagotribune.com


chicagotribune--2020-11-16--Double lung transplants at Northwestern Memorial are allowing seriously ill patients to survive COVI

Double lung transplants at Northwestern Memorial are allowing seriously ill patients to survive COVID-19′s ‘bomb blast’

Despite the high-risk nature of the surgery , some transplant centers around the country have begun performing the operation .
@ @ @ @ @ Chicago hospital has considered doing the procedure , though the transplant surgeon warned of its @ @ @ @ @ from across the country continue to come for Northwestern , which has performed more of @ @ @ @ @ than any other hospital in the world , Bharat said .

Nurse Kari Wegg sits in a chair as she recovers from lung transplant surgery for COVID-19 complications on Nov. 9, 2020, at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago. According to thoracic surgeon Dr. Ankit Bharat, who performed the operation, she is one of the first medical professionals with COVID-19 to receive a lung transplant. Wegg worked at Ascension St. Vincent Hospital in Indianapolis. (Erin Hooley / Chicago Tribune)
At a dark moment over the summer, Rodney Wegg was forced to consider removing his wife from life support.
After testing positive for COVID-19 in July, Kari Wegg, a previously healthy nurse, worsened until she was placed on a ventilator and given a grim outlook for survival.
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“Give me some more time,” Wegg’s doctor told her husband, offering him and their two young sons a glimmer of hope.
Their perseverance paid off when, months later, Wegg, a 48-year-old neonatal intensive care unit nurse, awoke as the sixth COVID-19 patient at Northwestern Memorial Hospital to receive a groundbreaking lung transplant surgery, free of the disease and breathing with two new lungs.
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The double lung transplant surgery for critical COVID-19 patients, which was first performed in the U.S. at Northwestern in June, has now been done seven times at the Chicago hospital by Dr. Ankit Bharat, chief of thoracic surgery and surgical director of the Northwestern Medicine Lung Transplant Program, and a team of surgeons. The surgery is considered more difficult than other lung transplants because of the damage COVID-19 has done to the organ, Bharat said.
Despite the high-risk nature of the surgery, some transplant centers around the country have begun performing the operation. And at least one other Chicago hospital has considered doing the procedure, though the transplant surgeon warned of its difficulties. Meanwhile, calls from across the country continue to come for Northwestern, which has performed more of these surgeries at this point than any other hospital in the world, Bharat said.
“Every day we get four to six phone calls at a minimum,” Bharat said.
The requests can be disheartening because often they come from people who are too sick for the surgery. The hospital also has its own capacity limits for how many people can be accommodated.
But with at least three more patients accepted for surgery, Bharat is hopeful that the hospital has honed a procedure that can offer a last chance for otherwise terminal patients.
The patients have come from as close as Indiana and as far as Texas and Washington, D.C. They must temporarily relocate to Chicago for about a year after the surgery in order to be near the hospital for recovery and extensive rehab that includes building muscle and mastering walking and even more strenuous activity again.
A number of the patients have rented small apartments, and are staying connected with family and friends back home through video chats.
Dr. Ankit Bharat listens to nurse Kari Wegg's lungs as she recovers from her lung transplant surgery for COVID-19 complications on Nov. 9, 2020, at Northwestern Memorial Hospital. (Erin Hooley / Chicago Tribune)
One of those patients is Wegg, who is from suburban Indianapolis, but was taken to Northwestern after she was approved for the surgery.
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“I feel so lucky,” Wegg said from her hospital bed, growing emotional.
As of last week, the United States had surpassed 10.6 million COVID-19 cases since the beginning of the pandemic, with more than 242,000 deaths. Cases across the country, and in Illinois, have been surging upward.
As these most critically ill patients speak out, they have the same message for other people as cases rise to alarming levels.
Wear a mask. Wash your hands. Stay home when you can.
“With all those things, you are saving someone else’s life, and even your own,” Wegg said.
‘Didn’t want to give up on her’
In the spring, as COVID-19 infections flooded into Chicago hospitals, Bharat watched with dismay at the severity of infection in people who were previously very healthy, like a personal trainer, in prime physical fitness, who became very ill.
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Bharat was on the hospital’s coronavirus task force that was searching for treatments to save some of the critical patients. Lung transplants had helped COVID-19 patients in Europe and China, but Bharat said there was some concern at Northwestern about the risks of the procedure.
“There were a lot of doubts amongst our team,” he said. “It was the height of the pandemic. We didn’t know if it would work.”
They also were worried about risking the health and safety of health care workers.
But when 28-year-old Mayra Ramirez appeared to be near death, the team decided to perform the first surgery, Bharat said. The surgery was successful and Ramirez is doing well, he said.
“Our team didn’t want to give up on her,” he said.
When any transplant patient needs an organ, a national system gives them a rating based, for the most part, on how sick the person is, with the highest rating of 100 for the most urgent cases, Bharat said. The COVID-19 transplant patients have received ratings in the range of 80 to 90, he said.
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As he performs the surgeries, Bharat remains amazed at the damage COVID-19 has done to people’s lungs.
“It’s like a bomb blast has gone off,” he said.
The surgery lasts about 10 hours, and usually requires eight to 10 units of blood — a startling contrast to the half unit needed for other, non COVID-19 lung transplants.
“It shows you how sick they are, how much bleeding happens,” he said.
He has been urging other hospitals to consider offering the surgery, though he said associations that regulate transplant centers track mortality rates, which can make some hospitals reluctant to take on risky procedures that could downgrade their ratings.
“Because of a lot of these pressures, centers have to be very careful in what types of cases they do,” Bharat said.
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Still, he pointed to an 100% survival rate over 30 days for his seven patients. The patients, who were otherwise terminal, are all doing well so far. The hospital will continue to track their progress over a longer period of time.
“We want to help everybody but we only have so much capacity,” he said.
The University of Chicago Medical Center has consulted with a handful of COVID-19 patients about a lung transplant, but they weren’t good candidates, either because they were too sick, or would recover without a transplant, according to Maria Lucia Madariaga, a transplant surgeon and assistant professor of medicine at the university.
“We are definitely open to the possibility, but the patient needs to be very specific patient,” she said.
Madariaga said a candidate for that surgery would likely need to be a younger person who was relatively healthy before the COVID-19 infection. She said lung transplants come with a long recovery, and patients in general have a lower rate of survival in the long term than other organ transplant patients.
“It requires a lot of judgment in an arena where there are so many unknowns, and lung donors are very rare,” she said.
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Overall, the doctors say the procedure is an absolute last resort, so they are asking people to remain cautious.
As cases in Illinois rise at an alarming rate, Bharat warns that no one is immune from contracting a severe case of COVID-19. His seven patients are all ages, come from different ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds and were all previously pretty healthy.
“People really need to take this seriously,” he said.
A minute on the treadmill
One of Bharat’s patients is a doctor who likely contracted the virus helping others in a South Texas emergency room.
Earlier this year, Andrew Lawrence, 54, an emergency medicine physician, saw COVID-19-positive patients stream the Rio Grande Valley hospital. He treated their shortness of breath, sometimes intubating them, or transferring the critical cases to the intensive care unit.
In July, when he came down with a cough and tested positive for the virus, he figured he’d be OK, because most people recover.
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But then he was taken to his own hospital.
“I took a turn for the worst,” he said.
Later, he was transferred to a hospital in San Antonio, where a doctor suggested a lung transplant, and told him he would have to travel to Chicago for the procedure.
“Whatever I need to do to get better,” Lawrence said.
Lawrence was the fifth patient operated on by Bharat’s team.
Born in Jamaica and raised in New York City, Lawrence had wanted to be a doctor since childhood, when he thought a doctor who treated him for a virus saved his life. (His life was never actually in danger, Lawrence said wryly.)
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When he started treating patients with the new coronavirus, he saw it as fulfilling his role.
Yet the extent the virus ravaged his body shocked him, even as a doctor.
“The weakness, the inability to walk, the muscle wasted, I’ve never seen it,” Lawrence said, noting that he saw patients in the ER at the beginning of their illness. “I’m just learning to walk again.”
He plans to rent an apartment in Chicago after a stay at a rehab center. He doesn’t like the cold but looks forward to small pleasures, like trying some Chicago pizza. The only pizza he’s eaten recently has been hospital pizza.
“It’s no good,” he said.
Bharat is encouraged by his progress. He recently monitored Lawrence while he spent about a minute walking on the treadmill.
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Though a single minute of walking may seem disheartening to someone who was previously active, Bharat said it is a hopeful sign, and noted that the other, earlier patients have already returned to close to their previous level of activity.
‘I want to hug my children’
Wegg and her husband are also health care workers who braved the virus before contracting it themselves.
In the spring, both Wegg and her husband were hard at work at local hospitals, she as a nurse and he as a respiratory therapist treating COVID-19 patients.
At the end of July, Wegg tested positive for the virus. She had trouble breathing, and lost her sense of taste and smell. Other family members also tested positive, but Wegg was the only one who became seriously ill.
She went to a clinic, then the ER and then was moved to the ICU.
“I just kept getting worse,” she said.
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Wegg remembers little from this time, recounting the bizarre experience of waking up in a new hospital in a new state about 10 weeks later, after missing nearly the whole summer. Those months were also rough on her husband.
Rodney Wegg said he shielded his sons from the severity of the illness initially, but eventually had to fill them in when it looked like he might need to decide whether to remove her from support.
“Did they cry?” Wegg asked her husband in a soft voice.
“Of course,” he replied.
Wegg hasn’t seen her sons, 13 and 14, in person since July. She speaks with them over FaceTime while they stay with their grandmother back in Indiana.
“I want to hug my children,” Wegg said.
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She and her husband have rented an apartment in the Gold Coast to stay in while she rehabilitates. Generally transplant patients have to stay near their hospital in case of complications, but Bharat is looking into ways to eventually ease that burden and transfer care somewhere closer to home.
On Wednesday morning, Wegg lay in her hospital bed, draped with a Halloween-themed blanket that her husband purchased, along with a witch’s hat and some other trinkets to raise her spirits.
In the small, sterile room, Wegg spoke wistfully of pumpkins, red and gold leaves and the smell of the air during autumn.
She doesn’t know what the future will look like. She can’t walk yet, though she can shuffle a few feet with a walker. She doesn’t know when she will be able to resume her career, or see her children.
But she is alive, thanks to someone who checked the box for an organ donation, she said with tears in her eyes.
mabuckley@chicagotribune.com


chicagotribune--2020-11-16--Man, 32, critically injured in Far South Side house fire, police say

About 11:20 p.m. , officers responded to a fire in the 10000 block of South Indiana Avenue in the Rosemoor @ @ @ @ @ Chicago Fire Department brought out an unconscious 32-year-old man , and he was taken to @ @ @ @ @ Center in critical condition with possible smoke inhalation .

A 32-year-old man was critically injured during a Far South Side house fire, according to Chicago police.
About 11:20 p.m., officers responded to a fire in the 10000 block of South Indiana Avenue in the Rosemoor neighborhood, police said. Chicago Fire Department brought out an unconscious 32-year-old man, and he was taken to the University of Chicago Medical Center in critical condition with possible smoke inhalation.
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The cause of fire is under investigation, police said. No other injuries were reported.
pfry@chicagotribune.com
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Twitter @paigexfry


chicagotribune--2020-11-16--Coronavirus in Illinois updates: Here’s what happened Nov. 14-15 with COVID-19 in the Chicago area

The data — covering the period from Aug. 1 to Nov. 7 — shows that the state is short of @ @ @ @ @ tracing for 90 % of cases , although some regions came very close .
Others @ @ @ @ @ .
For example , in Region 4 in far southern Illinois , tracers reached out @ @ @ @ @ people , while in Region 10 , which is suburban Cook County , the figure @ @ @ @ @ to the state .

We have lifted the paywall on this story. To support essential reporting, please consider becoming a subscriber .
CTU workers direct vehicles lined up for COVID-19 testing outside of the Chicago Teachers Union on Dec. 30, 2021, in Chicago. CPS starts back to school on Monday following their holiday break. (Stacey Wescott / Chicago Tribune)
Illinois public health officials Sunday reported 10,631 new and probable COVID-19 cases, as well as 72 additional fatalities.
The total number of known infections statewide is 573,616. The total number of fatalities since the pandemic began now stands at 10,742, officials said.
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There were 84,831 tests reported Sunday. The seven-day statewide test positivity rate is 14.8%.
The state had set a record on Friday with 15,415 new and probable cases.
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Meanwhile, Gov. J.B. Pritzker announced Friday he was extending a host of coronavirus-related executive orders for another 30 days, including an extension of a moratorium on evictions.
The state also updated the data that it posts related to contact tracing, which involves reaching out to people diagnosed with COVID-19, urging them to isolate and asking them where they’ve been and whom they’ve seen during the two weeks prior to their positive test so those people can be asked to quarantine.
The data — covering the period from Aug. 1 to Nov. 7 — shows that the state is short of its goal of launching contact tracing for 90% of cases, although some regions came very close. Others appear nowhere near that target. For example, in Region 4 in far southern Illinois, tracers reached out to 89% of sick people, while in Region 10, which is suburban Cook County, the figure was 17%, according to the state.
And speaking of the suburbs, one day after Mayor Lori Lightfoot urged Chicago residents to stay home for the next month, suburban Cook County is doing the same.
The new advisory, similar to the city’s version, goes into effect on Monday and lasts for 30 days. Additionally, Lightfoot is imposing a 10-person limit on weddings, birthday parties, funerals and some social events in Chicago starting Monday.
Here’s what’s happening this weekend with COVID-19 in the Chicago area and Illinois:
Sunday
Cook County Jail halts in-person visits because of COVID-19
The Cook County sheriff’s office is cancelling all in-person visits to the county jail starting Monday because of the recent spike in coronavirus cases, the sheriff’s office said Sunday.
After the state’s stay-at-home order was lifted in the spring, the jail resumed in-person visits in June at an outdoor setting, according to a news release.
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“Video visitation will continue to be provided to detainees as it has since April, and in-person visitation will be reinstated soon as it is safe to do so,” according to the release.
Although the jail “has had great success containing the virus, given the strong encouragement by state and local health officials to promote staying at home and the current test positivity rates in the community, this temporary modification will help protect the health and safety of staff and detainees,” the sheriff’s office said in the release. Read more here. — Chicago Tribune staff
Demonstration shows support for restaurants as Will County COVID-19 rate soars
A small group of Joliet area residents gathered Sunday to show their support for area restaurants and protest indoor dining bans.
Originally billed as a “Save our Restaurants” march, the event turned into a small caravan through Joliet streets.
The dozen or so residents gathered also expressed their discontent with Governor J.B. Pritzker’s orders banning indoor dining and bar service and questioned the COVID-19 data provided by health officials.
“We are the living men and women given dominion over this world by God himself, and it is time to realize how precious and powerful we truly are,” Michelle Lee, one of the organizers of Sunday’s events, said as she read from a lengthy statement. Read the full story here. — Alicia Fabbre, Daily Southtown
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Strong winds knock over trees, traffic lights and prompt COVID-19 test site closures
Wind gusts as strong as 60 mph were wreaking havoc around Chicago Sunday afternoon, toppling trees, traffic signals and causing the closure of coronavirus testing centers, officials said.
The state shut down community COVID-19 testing sites in Arlington Heights, Waukegan, South Holland and Aurora, according to the Department of Public Health, which said the sites would reopen Monday.
Read more here. —Katherine Rosenberg-Douglas
Kaneland school district halts in-person classes due to increase in COVID-19 cases
Kaneland School District 302 will temporarily halt in-person learning in response to a spike in COVID-19 cases.
District officials announced Sunday a transition to full remote learning will begin Wednesday for all students.
To further ensure the health and safety of students and staff, athletics and after-school activities have been postponed effective immediately, the district said.
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The district is in its 14th week of school, Superintendent Todd Leden said. The district had been using a hybrid learning format, with a combination of in-person and remote learning.Parents had the choice to opt for fully remote learning for their children when school began in the fall.
Read more here. —Lisa Girardi, Aurora Beacon-News
10,631 new and probable cases, 72 new deaths reported
Illinois public health officials Sunday reported 10,631 new and probable COVID-19 cases, as well as 72 additional fatalities.
The total number of known infections statewide is 573,616. The total number of fatalities since the pandemic began now stands at 10,742, officials said. There were 84,831 tests reported Sunday. The seven-day statewide test positivity rate is 14.8%.
As of Saturday night, 5,474 state residents were in the hospital with COVID-19 — 1,045 of those patients were in the ICU and 490 were on ventilators, officials reported.
—Chicago Tribune staff
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Suburban school boards feel the heat — and the hate — as they weigh COVID-19 school closings
As the latest deadly surge of the virus is breaking records across the Chicago region, local school board members are being targeted by frustrated parents in towns including Wheaton, Deerfield and Naperville who are demanding that schools reopen and contending that the virus itself is far less dangerous to their kids than the devastating impact of shuttered schools.
While some parents have gone out of their way to show support and appreciation for their work, school board members are also getting pressure from teachers unions who feel in-person instruction places their members' and members' families' health at risk.
Read more here. —Karen Ann Cullotta
Lost in translation: How language barriers can add anguish and complicate care for COVID-19 patients who don’t speak English
Maria Isabel Alfaro was 50 when she died of COVID-19. She did not speak English, and before her death, she shared the anguish and desperation she felt because she wasn’t able to understand or communicate with the medical staff, her partner, Rodolfo Reyes said.
Although the medical staff at the Chicago hospital where Alfaro was hospitalized provided interpreters when possible, “it wasn’t enough,” he said.
Reyes worries that his partner couldn’t communicate something that could have saved her life.
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Patients, community leaders and health officials say language barriers are “an added burden” to those suffering from COVID-19 and their loved ones. They recognize the lack of bilingual medical staff and prevention resources in Spanish influenced the way the virus harshly hit the Latino community in Chicago and across the nation.
Facing a second coronavirus surge, hospitals will again see an influx of patients, including many who do not speak or understand English. Approximately 6 in 10 Latino adults have issues communicating with a health care provider due to language and or cultural barriers, according to a 2018 study by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.
Read more here. —Laura Rodríguez Presa and Alison Bowen
Saturday
11,028 new confirmed and probable COVID-19 cases and 166 additional deaths reported
The total number of new confirmed and probable COVID-19 cases in Illinois is 11,028, a little lower than Friday’s record-breaking 15,415, state public health officials reported on Saturday.
But the number of new deaths on Saturday spiked to 166, at least six times higher than Friday’s figure, 27.
Dr. Ngozi Ezike, the IDPH director, noted during Friday’s COVID-19 state briefing that due to a data reporting issue there was a delay in deaths reported that day. According to a news release, 66 of the deaths “that occurred yesterday are being reported with today’s total.”
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The total number of known infections statewide is 562,995, The total number of fatalities since the pandemic began now stands at 10,670, official said.
—Rosemary Sobol
In rural areas with surging COVID-19 cases, masks are rare and concern levels low
t’s not that people in Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, Iowa and elsewhere don’t realize their states are leading the nation in new cases per capita. It’s that many of them aren’t especially concerned.
Wayne County, home to 6,400 people in southern Iowa, has the state’s second-highest case rate, yet its public health administrator, Shelley Bickel, says mask-wearing is rare. She finds it particularly appalling when she sees older people, who are at high risk, shopping at a grocery store without one.
“I just want to get on the speaker and say, ‘Why don’t you have your mask on?’ It’s just amazing,” Bickel said.
Read more here. —Associated Press
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Friday
No one fined for violating Chicago’s travel order so far
In the four months Chicago has had a mandatory travel quarantine order in place, only warning letters have gone out to people believed to have broken the rules, city officials said Thursday.
No one has been fined so far under the city’s order, implemented by Mayor Lori Lightfoot over the Fourth of July weekend, which requires travelers from states with high coronavirus infection rates to quarantine for 14 days after returning to Chicago, city spokesman Andrew Buchanan said in a statement. He said the city was not releasing information on how many letters have gone out.
Read more here. —Alice Yin


chicagotribune--2020-11-16--Lightfoot doubles down on property tax hike in private meeting, tells aldermen not to record her

The move is being pitched as a budget sweetener to help secure their support , though some Latino aldermen have @ @ @ @ @ Latino Caucus is against the move , which some members see as a cynical attempt @ @ @ @ @ Lightfoot reiterated during a weekend call with aldermen that she wants to make that happen @

Mayor Lori Lightfoot doubled down on her proposed $94 million property tax increase during a private meeting with the City Council Latino Caucus on Sunday, telling them they’ll have to pass a hike either this year or closer to the 2023 election, aldermen said.
Lightfoot also reiterated that she plans to link her budget with changes to the city’s sanctuary city ordinance even though the Latino Caucus opposes tying them together.
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Early in the meeting, Lightfoot told City Council members, “I don’t consent to being recorded,” according to five aldermen who were on the call.
It’s a sign of a lack of trust and indicates how fraught some of her conversations with aldermen have become. In June, Lightfoot blasted an unnamed alderman for leaking audio of a heated conversation between her and 15th Ward Ald. Raymond Lopez, saying Chicago leaders need to be able to speak candidly among themselves.
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Mayor Lori Lightfoot speaks during a news conference at The Terminal project site in Chicago on Nov. 9, 2020. (Youngrae Kim / Chicago Tribune)
Last week, the mayor had an at-times contentious call with the City Council Black Caucus. Lightfoot told the group “don’t come to me for s--- for the next three years” if they don’t support the budget, two aldermen recalled.
Lightfoot has been working behind the scenes to muster the 26 votes that she needs to pass the budget. As a nod to the challenges she’s faced scrounging up support, over the weekend she pulled back on hundreds of layoffs that were part of the spending plan.
The job cuts would have amounted to roughly $13 million in a $12.8 billion budget and were fought by some aldermen and labor unions. City officials said cannabis sales tax money would help make up the difference.
In another attempt to build support for her budget, Lightfoot has approached the Latino Caucus to remove exceptions in Chicago’s Welcoming City Ordinance, the city’s sanctuary law, that allow police to cooperate with federal immigration authorities under limited circumstances. The city’s welcoming ordinance has been criticized by activists for years due to such allowances.
The move is being pitched as a budget sweetener to help secure their support, though some Latino aldermen have balked at that. The Latino Caucus is against the move, which some members see as a cynical attempt to wrangle votes, but Lightfoot reiterated during a weekend call with aldermen that she wants to make that happen.
Lightfoot spokeswoman Anel Ruiz released a statement noting that Lightfoot “heard the concerns regarding the Welcoming City Ordinance and looks forward to continued dialogue around this important issue.”
As first reported in the Tribune, Lightfoot’s approach to closing a projected $1.2 billion hole relies on a 3-cent gas tax hike and a $94 million property tax increase. It also includes a provision to raise property taxes annually thereafter by an amount tied to the consumer price index.
In addition, Lightfoot is asking to refinance $501 million in city debt for the 2021 budget, which would provide a jolt of new revenue next year but likely cost taxpayers more down the road. Similar borrowing tactics under Mayors Richard M. Daley and Rahm Emanuel drew deep criticism, but the Lightfoot administration said the city’s current financial disaster makes such a move appropriate.
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The mayor’s property hike tax remains a sticking point for some aldermen. Lightfoot has tried to head off opposition, calling it a “modest” increase and arguing that she’s taken other measures to reduce the hit on taxpayers.
A sixth alderman on Sunday’s Latino Caucus call said the mayor’s point about a property tax increase made sense.
“Sometimes people think of avoiding the pain now for political reasons (means) they’re going to escape reality and you can’t escape the reality,” said the alderman, who did not recall the mayor’s comment about recording the meeting.
In 2015, then-Mayor Emanuel won approval of a four-year, $543 million property tax increase for police and fire pensions. He got “yes” votes from 35 aldermen.
gpratt@chicagotribune.com


chicagotribune--2020-11-16--Winds knock over trees, traffic lights and prompt COVID-19 test site closures Sunday as 60 mph gusts

Winds knock over trees, traffic lights and prompt COVID-19 test site closures Sunday as 60 mph gusts lash northern Illinois

Windy days are to be expected in autumn , but this year and the last month in particular have had @ @ @ @ @ days , according to the National Weather Service .
In the last 35 days , @ @ @ @ @ were recorded at O ’ Hare on 20 days , up from an average of @ @ @ @ @ nine days with gusts 40 mph or greater clocked , up from an average of @ @ @ @ @ have seen gusts 50 mph or greater , with two of those just in the @ @ @

Wind gusts as strong as 69 mph were wreaking havoc around the Chicago area Sunday, toppling trees and traffic signals and causing the closure of coronavirus testing centers, officials said.
A wind advisory that had been set to expire early Sunday evening was extended until 8 p.m. in Cook, Lake, DuPage, Kane and McHenry counties, as well until 9 p.m. in parts of Wisconsin. Although snow that had been forecast was looking less and less likely, the wind and low cloud cover wasn’t expected to let up until closer to Tuesday morning, meteorologists said.
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Windy days are to be expected in autumn, but this year and the last month in particular have had a higher frequency of gusty days, according to the National Weather Service. In the last 35 days, gusts 30 mph or greater were recorded at O’Hare on 20 days, up from an average of 11 days. There were nine days with gusts 40 mph or greater clocked, up from an average of two days. Three days have seen gusts 50 mph or greater, with two of those just in the last week.
Due to high winds and the safety of patients and staff, the Arlington Heights, Waukegan, South Holland, and Aurora COVID-19 Community Based Testing Sites are closed for the remainder of the day and will re-open tomorrow 11/16. — IDPH (@IDPH) November 15, 2020
A cold front moved into the area Sunday, bringing with it increasingly strong wind gusts, leading to a wind advisory for all of northern Illinois and much of northwest Indiana, said Brian Leatherwood, a National Weather Service meteorologist. South to southwest wind gusts of 40 mph had been recorded by about 9 a.m., he said. By late morning, a wind gust of 69 mph was recorded at Midway Airport, the peak of the day. Additionally, gusts of 61 mph at the Harrison-Dever Crib in Lake Michigan and 59 mph in Kane County were recorded, according to the weather service.
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“It’s a pretty significant weather system moving in,” Leatherwood said. “We have a wind advisory in effect and have already seen gusts of 40 mph and we could see gusts of up to 50 or 60 mph throughout most of the day, until about 10 p.m., when it should ease up a bit.”
By 1 p.m. a large tree fell in the 3000 block of East Cheltenham Place in Chicago’s South Shore neighborhood, striking a gas meter and multiple cars, according to preliminary information from the fire department. A traffic signal at the intersection of South Archer Avenue and South Loomis Street in Bridgeport was downed during the afternoon as well.
And the state shut down community COVID-19 testing sites in Arlington Heights, Waukegan, South Holland and Aurora, according to the Department of Public Health, which said the sites would reopen Monday.
Leatherwood said the front also was responsible for the low cloud ceiling that was expected to persist.
“That low cloud extends pretty far back into Iowa,” he said.
With the 875 North Michigan Avenue building, formerly known as the John Hancock Center, in the background, a person crosses Chicago Avenue in Chicago's West Town neighborhood on Nov. 14, 2020. (Chris Sweda / Chicago Tribune)
All of northern Illinois was under the wind advisory until early Sunday evening, and the weather service warned residents to secure objects outdoors and cautioned drivers of high-profile vehicles driving may be unsafe at times.
“Gusty winds will blow around unsecured objects. Tree limbs could be blown down and a few power outages may result. Difficult travel is expected for high profile vehicles on north-south oriented roads,” according to the weather service.
Leatherwood said concerns about an early morning dusting of snow didn’t pan out but there was a slight chance of flurries in the afternoon.
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“We might see some additional showers, maybe even some snow, but it’s more of an irritant, along with the continued strong winds,” he said.
Leatherwood said there isn’t much moisture within the system, which is why any precipitation, whether it falls as rain, snow, or a mix of the two, shouldn’t last long.
The wind was expected to begin to die down overnight and into Monday, he said. The week will be off to a cold start, but it should gradually warm up, he said. Still, it won’t reach the record-breaking warmth from earlier this month when Chicago was treated to six straight days of November weather reaching into the 70s.
“Hopefully the weather’s looking decent after the cold start. We’ll have a slow trending up in temperatures and the week is looking decent with high 40s, low 50s, once we get rid of this system,” Leatherwood said. “We first just have to contend with these really strong winds today.”
For more weather news, visit the Tribune’s weather page.
kdouglas@chicagotribune.com
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Twitter @312BreakingNews


chicagotribune--2020-11-15--Man stabbed to death in East Chatham neighborhood brawl

He was pronounced dead at the scene .
He was identified as Malcolm Mullins , 29 , of the 2300 @ @ @ @ @ in Broadview , according to the medical examiner ’ s office .

A man was discovered fatally stabbed in a backyard of a home following a fight Saturday afternoon in the East Chatham neighborhood on the South Side, Chicago police said.
About 12:05 p.m., officers found the man lying in a backyard in the 8200 block of South Dobson Avenue after a physical altercation broke out involving multiple people, police said.
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He was pronounced dead at the scene. He was identified as Malcolm Mullins, 29, of the 2300 block of South 11th Avenue in Broadview, according to the medical examiner’s office.
Mullins died from multiple stab wounds in a homicide, the medical examiner’s office determined following an autopsy Sunday. A police source said earlier that the man may have been stabbed to death.
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Detectives were investigating.


chicagotribune--2020-11-15--Evening of playing video games in Roseland ends with boy, 12, wounded in accidental shooting

The boy who was shot , an eighth grader , was enjoying video games with three other young boys , @ @ @ @ @ 6 , in an upstairs bedroom of a relative ’ s home in the 700 @ @ @ @ @ when the 13-year-old left momentarily and came back holding and “ playing with ” a @ @ @ @ @ police said .

Crime scene tape is seen in front of a home in the 700 block of East 105th Place, where a 12-year-old boy was shot on Saturday, Nov. 14, 2020. (Chris Sweda / Chicago Tribune)
Chicago police determined the shooting of a 12-year-old boy Saturday night was accidental, and no charges will be filed against the 13-year-old who was playing with a gun at a home in the Roseland neighborhood on the city’s Far South Side.
The boy who was shot, an eighth grader, was enjoying video games with three other young boys, ages 13, 12 and 6, in an upstairs bedroom of a relative’s home in the 700 block of East 105th Place when the 13-year-old left momentarily and came back holding and “playing with” a .45-caliber blue steel handgun, police said.
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The boy told the 13-year-old not to point it at him and intentionally “bumped” into him to redirect the gun when it fired off, hitting the boy in the chest, according to a police report.
The boy told responding 5th District officers, “The kid with the mohawk shot me,” when they got there and found him sitting in a living room chair, the report said.
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An ambulance left the scene with the boy, who was in serious to critical condition, just after 7:45 p.m., Chicago Fire Department spokesman Larry Langford said.
He was taken to Comer Children’s Hospital, where a doctor treated him for a through-and-through gunshot wound to the right side of the chest, which exited under his right armpit, police said.
The boy’s mother was present at the home when the shooting happened, but it was not clear who the gun, which police confiscated at the scene, belonged to.
The 13-year-old was taken to the Area 2 police station for questioning. But as of Sunday, police determined the shooting was noncriminal and accidental, and no charges will be filed.
rsobol@chicagotribune.com
pfry@chicagotribune.com


chicagotribune--2020-11-15--Police investigate Gages Lake shooting

Police investigate Gages Lake shooting

The shooter is believed to have initially fled on foot , and then may have left the area in a @ @ @ @ @ police said .
Police said that based on initial reports , the shooting does not @ @ @ @ @

Police were searching Saturday night in the Grayslake area for a person believed to have shot and critically wounded a man earlier in the day.
Lake County sheriff’s police confirmed that they responded to a report of shots fired in the 33800 block of Oak Street, near Gages Lake, which is east of Grayslake, Saturday afternoon. Officials said other details were not available for release Saturday night.
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Responding officers said they found a victim lying in a driveway with apparent gunshot wounds. The victim’s injuries were described as critical, and the person was transported to an area hospital.
The shooter is believed to have initially fled on foot, and then may have left the area in a vehicle, sheriff’s police said. Police said that based on initial reports, the shooting does not appear to be random.
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Nearby residents posting to a social media site reported that police had converged on the area around 2 p.m. Police said they plan to release more information this weekend.
Check back for updates.


chicagotribune--2020-11-15--Family of Ryan Bost, slain Evanston basketball standout, calls for anyone with information about his

Family of Ryan Bost, slain Evanston basketball standout, calls for anyone with information about his death to come forward

“ For the young people that we know were present when my nephew got murdered , we need you to @ @ @ @ @ said .
“ We need you to talk to your family , and parents and @ @ @ @ @ to the police station and give them all the information pertaining to what happened with @ @ @ @ @ s a lot of pain and suffering going on here .
”

Bobby Bost and Schawanda Bost call for anyone with information on their son's death to come forward in a news conference on Nov. 13, 2020. Ryan Bost, 20, was shot and killed on Nov. 9. (Brian L. Cox / Pioneer Press)
Four days after Ryan Bost was shot and killed on Chicago’s North Side, his mother stood on the front stairs of her Evanston home and tearfully pleaded for anyone with information about her son’s murder to come forward.
“I’m hurting,” Schawanda Bost said Friday afternoon, as she wept on the front stairs of her home. “I want them to find who did this to my son, everybody who was involved.”
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Bost, 20, died Monday after he was shot while sitting in the back seat of a parked car in the Rogers Park neighborhood of Chicago, officials said. According to police, a man walked up to a vehicle in 6700 block of North Newgard Avenue at 7 p.m., exchanged words with Bost and then fired.
A friend drove Bost to Amita Saint Francis Hospital in Evanston, where he died, police said.
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“My son didn’t deserve this,” Schawanda Bost continued tearfully, flanked by family members. “He’s a loving, kind person. He’d do anything for anybody. For somebody to just take his life like that … I’m hurting. It’s terrible. Whoever was involved … I want them to pay for this.”
Ryan’s father Bobby Bost pleaded for his son’s killer to come forward.
Ryan Bost goes up for a layup in a game for ETHS. (Brian O'Mahoney / Pioneer Press)
“Please. It’s not going to be easy, but you have to because Ryan didn’t have nothing but brothers," Bobby Bost said. "He had no enemies at all. Please for the sake of yourself.”
On Friday, dozens of candles, photographs and handmade posters were on the front lawn of the Bost family home. The memorial was set up amid an outpouring of community support for the family of the gifted basketball player and former Evanston Township High School standout.
“Ryan was somebody who was very special to our community. Not just our basketball team not just our student body at the high school,” said Mike Ellis, Ryan’s coach at Evanston Township High School.
Ellis said Ryan Bost was special and someone who did not have any enemies.
The Bost family calls for anyone with information about the death of Ryan Bost to come forward in a news conference on Nov. 13, 2020. Ryan Bost, 20, was shot and killed on Nov. 9. (Brian L. Cox / Pioneer Press)
“Ryan was a very likable young man who always put others before himself. There are a lot of Ryan Bost supporters walking around town," Ellis said. "That’s because he lived life the right way. Ryan was always positive. Ryan was a person who always tried to lift others up. I just love everything about him.”
Justin Blake, who is close with the Bost family, joined other family members on Friday in asking that anyone with information on the murder contact authorities, even if it is anonymously.
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“For the young people that we know were present when my nephew got murdered, we need you to be strong,” Blake said. “We need you to talk to your family, and parents and we need you to go to the police station and give them all the information pertaining to what happened with Ryan Bost. There’s a lot of pain and suffering going on here.”
Brian L. Cox is a freelance reporter.


chicagotribune--2020-11-15--2 killed in crash near Illinois-Wisconsin border

According to police , the younger man was westbound on Russell Road in a 2007 Chevrolet Trailblazer when he crossed @ @ @ @ @ then struck an eastbound 2006 Chevrolet Express which was being driven by the Zion man @ @ @ @ @ 7:15 p.m. near the intersection of Russell Road and Delany Road in Newport Township , @ @ @

Two men were killed Friday night in a head-on collision in Lake County near the Illinois-Wisconsin border, according to the Lake County Sheriff’s police.
The victims have been identified as a 79-year-old Zion resident and a 29-year-old Winthrop Harbor man, police said.
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According to police, the younger man was westbound on Russell Road in a 2007 Chevrolet Trailblazer when he crossed the centerline. His SUV then struck an eastbound 2006 Chevrolet Express which was being driven by the Zion man. The collision happened around 7:15 p.m. near the intersection of Russell Road and Delany Road in Newport Township, police said.
Officers responded, but both men were pronounced dead on the scene. Both were the sole occupants of their vehicles.
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Police said they do not know why the driver of the Trailblazer crossed into the oncoming lane.
An autopsy is scheduled for Tuesday, police said. The Sheriff’s Department Technical Crash Unit is continuing to investigate the collision.


chicagotribune--2020-11-17--Daywatch: Illinois hospitals pass spring highs for COVID-19 patients, schools put children into secl

Daywatch: Illinois hospitals pass spring highs for COVID-19 patients, schools put children into seclusion more than 10k times and what toilet flushes reveal about the pandemic

Minnesota Vikings defensive end Ifeadi Odenigbo drove Foles into the ground on his right side during the Bears ' final @ @ @ @ @ , and Foles stayed down for several minutes as trainers examined an injury that Nagy @ @ @ @ @ leg or hip .
Now the Bears have almost two weeks to sort out whether @ @ @ @ @ two weeks earlier , will be ready to play against the Packers should Foles ' @ @ @ @ @

Good morning, Chicago. On Monday, Illinois public health officials reported 11,632 newly confirmed and probable cases of COVID-19, as well as 37 additional fatalities. Meanwhile, Chicago’s public health commissioner said Monday that the city’s health care workers will be first in line to receive coronavirus vaccines but there likely won’t be enough initial doses to go around.
Also on Monday, Chicago and Cook County’s COVID-19 stay-home advisories took effect. Here’s everything you need to know about them.
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Here’s more coronavirus news and other top stories you need to know to start your day.
Listen to the Tribune | 2020 Election results | Experts answer your COVID questions | More newsletters | Puzzles & Games
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Dozens of people wait in line to get tested outside a mobile COVID-19 testing site Nov. 9, 2020, at Resurrection Project in Chicago's Pilsen neighborhood. (Antonio Perez/Chicago Tribune/TNS)
State officials on Monday continued to sound the alarm about rising COVID-19 hospital admissions this month, saying health care workers are being stretched to their limits while hospitals brace for a continued influx of patients.
Illinois had 5,581 people hospitalized for the coronavirus as of Sunday night — a nearly two-thirds increase over the 3,371 reported Nov. 1. The state also has surged past its spring peak set April 28, when 5,037 people were in the hospital for COVID-19.
Column: I took a COVID-19 test as a precaution. A week later, I was hospitalized.
The isolated timeout space at the Southwest Cook County Cooperative Association for Special Education in Oak Forest is shown on Oct. 11, 2019. (Zbigniew Bzdak / Chicago Tribune)
Illinois schools reported putting students into seclusion at least 10,776 times in the 2017-18 school year — up more than 50% from the last time districts sent seclusion data to the federal government, two years earlier.
University of Illinois at Chicago-School of Public Health researcher Abhilasha Shrestha, right, and Ph.D. student Christopher Owen with sewage samples from the city's three treatment plants, at the UIC School of Public Health building in Chicago, Nov. 12, 2020. (Jose M. Osorio / Chicago Tribune)
With COVID-19 infections spiking again at an alarming rate, Chicago is scrambling to catch up to other cities forecasting outbreaks by analyzing human waste flushed down thousands of toilets. Signs of the novel coronavirus show up in sewers about a week before people surge into hospitals with symptoms of the disease.
Chicago Bears quarterback Nick Foles (9) leaves the game with an injury in the final minute of the fourth quarter on Nov. 16, 2020 at Soldier Field. The Vikings defeated the Bears 19-13. (Brian Cassella / Chicago Tribune)
Chicago Bears coach Matt Nagy didn’t know what the injury was when he went out near the 10-yard line at Soldier Field late Monday, but he could see in Nick Foles' face how much pain the quarterback was in.
Minnesota Vikings defensive end Ifeadi Odenigbo drove Foles into the ground on his right side during the Bears' final drive of a 19-13 loss, and Foles stayed down for several minutes as trainers examined an injury that Nagy said was to Foles' leg or hip. Now the Bears have almost two weeks to sort out whether Mitch Trubisky, also injured two weeks earlier, will be ready to play against the Packers should Foles' injury keep him out.
From 5-1 to 5-5, what’s next for the Bears? Brad Biggs' 10 thoughts after their latest loss.
The owners of a six-bedroom, 8,000-square-foot duplex penthouse in the vintage cooperative building at 1500 N. Lake Shore Drive listed it Nov. 16, 2020, for $17 million. (Compass Real Estate)
The owner of a six-bedroom, 8,000-square-foot duplex penthouse at 1500 N. Lake Shore Drive in the Gold Coast was formally listed Monday afternoon for $17 million. Few have been in the penthouse, and photos of it have rarely been shown, surrounding it with mystique for decades. But now, it’s on the market and you can take a look inside.


chicagotribune--2020-11-17--Every toilet flush reveals a clue in fight to stop COVID-19

“ We stress that we aren ’ t testing down to the level of an individual homeowner , ” said @ @ @ @ @ s director of strategic management and diversity .
“ But when we detected a ( @ @ @ @ @ of our neighborhoods , we told people they were at higher risk , flooded the @ @ @ @ @ testing .
”

With COVID-19 infections spiking again at an alarming rate, Chicago is scrambling to catch up to other cities forecasting outbreaks by analyzing human waste flushed down thousands of toilets.
Signs of the novel coronavirus show up in sewers about a week before people surge into hospitals with symptoms of the disease, which during the past nine months has killed more than 1.3 million people worldwide, including 246,000 in the United States.
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In an attempt to provide doctors and nurses with more time to prepare for outbreaks, a growing number of communities in the U.S. and other countries are collecting sewage samples and posting charts showing changes over time in the genetic signature of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
Researchers from four universities and Argonne National Laboratory are rushing to add Chicago to the list early next year.
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“It’s much more efficient to test wastewater from a neighborhood, where a couple of samples could tell you as much as testing 500 people over and over again, said Sam Dorevitch, a University of Illinois at Chicago scientist involved in the project.
University of Illinois at Chicago-School of Public Health researcher Abhilasha Shrestha, right, and Ph.D. student Christopher Owen with sewage samples from the city's three treatment plants, at the UIC School of Public Health building in Chicago on Nov. 12, 2020. This lab is part of a new effort to monitor sewage to identify COVID-19 outbreaks. (Jose M. Osorio / Chicago Tribune)
The Chicago research is part of a fast-growing effort to streamline methods used for decades to track disease and pollution. Sewage monitoring helped investigators trace a 2013 polio outbreak in Israel and, more recently, directed social services in a handful of American cities hit hard by the opioid epidemic.
New studies focused on the coronavirus are grounded in flat, scientifically acceptable jargon. But a sewage-testing company formed by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is more direct, echoing potty-training books for toddlers.
“Everybody poops and pees every day,” Cambridge-based Biobot Analytics declares on its website. “This information is a readout of our health and well-being as a community.”
Based on interviews with a dozen scientists and government officials tracking the coronavirus, it appears one of the biggest challenges is determining where they should be collecting sewage.
The O'Brien Water Reclamation Plant is shown from the air in Skokie on May 27, 2020. (Erin Hooley / Chicago Tribune)
Chicago’s labyrinth of sewers winds more than 4,500 miles under city streets. It is divided between the Chicago Department of Water Management and the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District, two agencies with a history of bureaucratic turf wars and a reputation for blaming each other when the system fails.
District officials are sending weekly samples from three treatment plants to researchers at Stanford and the University of Michigan. Those samples are being shared with the group from Illinois universities, which is using computer modeling to estimate where neighborhood-level sampling could identify virus hot spots.
“In other places they tracked the initial wave and how the lockdown reduced the SARS-CoV-2 signal in wastewater,” said Aaron Packman, a Northwestern University environmental engineer. “It picked back up again after states and cities relaxed their lockdowns.”
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Boston and Tempe, Arizona, are two of the U.S. cities ahead of Chicago, largely because both had been studying opioids in sewage well before the pandemic began.
Pioneers also focused on how to inform the public about results and brainstormed how to debunk inevitable conspiracy theories.
“We stress that we aren’t testing down to the level of an individual homeowner,” said Rosa Inchausti, Tempe’s director of strategic management and diversity. “But when we detected a (coronavirus) spike in one of our neighborhoods, we told people they were at higher risk, flooded the area with masks and encouraged testing.”
Regular monitoring of Chicago sewage could help determine if person-to-person contact needs to be restricted in certain neighborhoods. After vaccines arrive, sewage tests could flag parts of the city lagging behind in inoculations.
Samples of raw sewage from the city's three treatment plants in storage in a refrigerator at the University of Illinois at Chicago School of Public Health building in Chicago, Nov. 12, 2020. (Jose M. Osorio / Chicago Tribune)
Behind the scenes there is an intriguing competition among researchers and technology startups striving to discover quick, cutting-edge methods that can be easily replicated — a grail Packman described as more TikTok than MySpace.
The Chicago project, financed by a $1.25 million grant from the Skokie-based Walder Foundation, also includes researchers from the University of Chicago and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
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Another band of scientists led by Julius Lucks, a Northwestern chemistry and biological engineering professor, is perfecting a method that involves adding a few drops of sewage to a test tube containing a reagent for the coronavirus, potentially speeding up test results.
Biobot, the Massachusetts startup, conducts testing and compiles charts of the COVID-19 signature in Boston and more than a dozen other communities.
“One of the things the virus did to the country was to educate people about the potential of this technology to improve public health,” said Mariana Matus, the company’s co-founder and chief executive. “It could help policymakers decide if it is safe to send kids to school or open restaurants. In other words, when it is OK to resume a normal life.”
mhawthorne@chicagotribune.com


chicagotribune--2020-11-17--More than 10,000 times in a single year, Illinois schools put children into seclusion, latest federa

More than 10,000 times in a single year, Illinois schools put children into seclusion, latest federal data shows

State Sen. Ann Gillespie , a Democrat from Arlington Heights , said a bill that would ban prone physical restraint @ @ @ @ @ schools that use isolated timeout is headed for consideration in the legislative veto session , @ @ @ @ @ week but has been pushed to January as COVID-19 cases spike statewide .
A version @ @ @ @ @ in the spring , but it was tabled after the pandemic cut short the regular @ @

Zena Naiditch, president and CEO of the disabilities watchdog group Equip for Equality, speaks in 2019 at a meeting of the Illinois State Board of Education at the Thompson Center in Chicago. (Antonio Perez / Chicago Tribune)
Illinois schools reported putting students into seclusion at least 10,776 times in the 2017-18 school year — up more than 50% from the last time districts sent seclusion data to the federal government, two years earlier.
The number of school districts that reported using seclusion, the practice of forcibly isolating a student in a small room or other space, also increased to 138 from 133, underscoring how entrenched the practice has been in the state.
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This story is a collaboration between the Tribune and ProPublica Illinois.
The U.S. Department of Education also collects data on the use of physical restraint, and 286 Illinois school districts reported restraining their students, also up from the 2015-16 school year. The figures include only public school districts and regional special education cooperatives, not private schools.
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Over the last year, in response to a November 2019 investigation by the Chicago Tribune and ProPublica Illinois, the state took several actions to discourage schools from relying on seclusion and physical restraint in response to difficult student behavior. But advocates for students with disabilities say the most recent data offers evidence that the new restrictions need to be enforced and that stronger steps are needed.
“We are very concerned about this trend,” said Zena Naiditch, president and CEO of Chicago-based Equip for Equality, a federally appointed watchdog for people with disabilities. “Illinois already had the distinction as being the national leader for its extremely heavy reliance on these dangerous and traumatic practices. To see numbers increasing is a very serious development.”
The isolated timeout space at the Southwest Cook County Cooperative Association for Special Education in Oak Forest is shown on Oct. 11, 2019. (Zbigniew Bzdak / Chicago Tribune)
Schools across the country submitted the 2017-18 data last year, at the same time the news organizations were reporting on seclusion and restraint for their investigation, “The Quiet Rooms.” That reporting examined 100 school districts' use of these practices during the 2017-18 school year plus fall of 2018.
Though Illinois law at the time allowed schools to use seclusion and restraint only when students posed a danger to themselves or others, the investigation found widespread overuse and misuse of the practices. Records obtained by the news organizations showed that school workers regularly used seclusion and restraint to punish children for misbehavior, to force them to comply with commands or for being disrespectful.
Government officials swiftly responded to the investigation by banning locked seclusion, promising to investigate misuse and creating a data collection system. But longer-term reform efforts have stalled. Lawmakers vowed to further restrict the use of seclusion and restraint and ban some restraints, but they have not done so.
The Illinois State Board of Education mandated that school districts send the agency three years' worth of reports that detailed each incident of restraint or seclusion, which Illinois calls isolated timeout. Before last November, there had been no state oversight of these practices despite a state law that required school districts to create the incident reports.
In response to questions from ProPublica Illinois and Tribune reporters, ISBE said it reviewed incident reports from about 700 school districts and programs and used the information to create a database of more than 66,000 incidents of seclusion and restraint from the 2017-18, 2018-19 and 2019-20 school years. A new Student Care Department, staffed with eight workers, is tasked with monitoring interventions and creating monthly reports on their use.
But the agency has yet to work with any school districts identified in the data as showing troubling patterns or to determine which districts failed to submit data at all. The department has opted not to take action against school workers, spokeswoman Jackie Matthews said. The agency has not yet reviewed the new federal data, she said.
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“ISBE will identify school districts, special education cooperatives, and fa special education entities for additional supports based on the data,” Matthews wrote in an email, and will ask them to consider “research-based actions to reduce the use of restrictive and traumatic procedures.”
State education officials had initially banned prone, or face-down, and supine, or face-up, restraints in the spring but then decided to allow them for at least this school year after pressure from a few private schools. More than 30 states ban prone restraints because they can restrict a child’s breathing.
“ISBE’s initial efforts were progressive and would have had a far-reaching impact on student health and safety,” Naiditch said. “But Illinois politics intervened and the school industry got the provisions watered down. We needed the governor to step up and empower ISBE to withstand this pressure. Then COVID hit, and with students learning from home, this issue lost its urgency.”
State Sen. Ann Gillespie, a Democrat from Arlington Heights, said a bill that would ban prone physical restraint and place more restrictions on schools that use isolated timeout is headed for consideration in the legislative veto session, which was to begin this week but has been pushed to January as COVID-19 cases spike statewide. A version of the bill was introduced in the spring, but it was tabled after the pandemic cut short the regular session.
The pending bill would restrict the use of seclusion and restraint and allow them only when there is an “imminent” danger of serious physical harm. It would also direct ISBE to sanction schools that don’t follow the state law on seclusion and restraint and would require schools to make a plan to reduce — and eventually eliminate — their reliance on the interventions.
Some schools have defended their use of seclusion and restraint and lobbied to continue using the interventions, saying they can’t serve students with challenging behaviors otherwise.
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Alison Maley, with the Illinois Statewide School Management Alliance, said the group supports a ban on prone restraint and has provided input to lawmakers on other parts of the legislation with the hope “that we can come to an agreement.” The group works on behalf of school boards, administrators and principals.
Naiditch said the latest seclusion and physical restraint figures, part of the Education Department’s Civil Rights Data Collection, again show why state officials should see this as an urgent matter, as Illinois reported using the practices more than most states. The data shows that seclusion and restraint are disproportionately used on students with disabilities and on boys.
The latest data release shows Illinois public schools reported having secluded and restrained students at least 23,530 times during the 2017-18 school year, up from 17,403 two years earlier.
A Tribune/ProPublica Illinois analysis of the new federal data found that more than 100 districts reported an increase in the number of times they secluded students. That included the Northern Suburban Special Education District in Highland Park, which logged 552 incidents of seclusion and 704 incidents of restraint in the 2017-18 school year. The district served 129 students that year, according to the data.
An assistant superintendent for the district, Andy Piper, declined to answer questions about the increase. “We don’t have any response that we wish to provide,” he wrote in an email.
The Northwest Suburban Special Education Organization in Mount Prospect reported 1,170 restraint incidents, more than any other school district in Illinois and nearly double the number from the 2015-16 school year. The district also reported an increase in the use of seclusion, to 676 instances.
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“A majority of our focus has been dealing with the pandemic, so at this time we do not have any information to share with you,” said Brad Carter, the district’s director for human resources and communications. Records previously obtained by the Tribune and ProPublica Illinois showed the district has used seclusion and restraint when students were physically aggressive, disruptive or disengaged.
Sixty Illinois districts reported using seclusion during the 2017-18 school year after reporting zero instances in the prior reporting period.
Those include Alton School District 11 in Madison County, which reported 226 seclusions involving 23 students. Suburban Chicago district Elmhurst 205 notified the department that it had secluded one student 132 times in the school year. And the tiny Tuscola district in Douglas County put five students in seclusion a total of 122 times, the data shows.
The Alton superintendent said the district’s previous report of no seclusion instances was an error, and a spokeswoman for the Elmhurst district declined to answer questions about its use of seclusion. Tuscola did not respond to a request for comment.
Some districts said they had not correctly reported their use of seclusion and restraint and have asked the Education Department if they can fix errors.
A timeout room at Jane Addams Junior High School in Schaumburg School District 54. (Schaumburg District 54 photo)
In Schaumburg District 54, for example, the district reported restraining students 880 times and secluding students 561 times, but district spokeswoman Terri McHugh said the numbers are actually higher.
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The federal data also is incorrect for Urbana District 116, according to Assistant Superintendent Todd Taylor. The district reported 1,074 seclusion incidents, but Taylor wrote in an email that the correct number is 46. He said that reporters brought the error to the district’s attention and that officials are unsure how the error was made.
Chicago Public Schools reported three seclusion instances in 2017-18, even though seclusion has been banned at the district since 2008. District spokeswoman Emily Bolton said those incidents occurred in two Chicago charter schools, which are not subject to the district’s policies on addressing student behavior.
Because the COVID-19 pandemic closed so many schools last spring, the Education Department decided not to collect data from the 2019-20 school year.
Jennifer Smith Richards is a Tribune reporter. Jodi S. Cohen is a reporter for ProPublica Illinois.
jrichards@chicagotribune.com


chicagotribune--2020-11-17--Should college students get a COVID-19 test before heading home for the holidays? Some schools urge

Should college students get a COVID-19 test before heading home for the holidays? Some schools urge or even require it, but ‘it doesn’t give you a free pass’

“ That ’ s not very convenient , but I think that makes the most sense , especially if you @ @ @ @ @ ’ s got comorbid conditions or is older who , when they do get COVID-19 @ @ @ @ @ to get more severally ill or potentially even die , ” Segreti said .
“ @ @ @ @ @ of those things into consideration .
”

From requiring students to take COVID-19 tests before departing campus to restricting dorm access, colleges are tightening protocols ahead of Thanksgiving and winter breaks, when thousands of students are expected to journey home for the holidays amid a national coronavirus surge.
Public health experts say traveling, especially in airports or by public transit, is inherently risky when COVID-19 infections are high, and colleges are discouraging students from shuttling back and forth in the coming weeks.
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But concern remains that young adults crisscrossing the country might seed new infections in their home communities — or within their own households. Though schools with resources to conduct exit testing aim to address that worry, doctors say students shouldn’t rely solely on negative results. It can take several days after infection for viral particles to become detectable in a sample, research shows.
University of Chicago student Gabi Garcia, 19, has decided not to travel home to Portland, Oregon, for Thanksgiving because then she wouldn't be allowed to move back into her campus housing before January. (Zbigniew Bzdak / Chicago Tribune)
For Gabi Garcia, a second-year student residing at the University of Chicago, staying in the city for Thanksgiving seemed to be a better option than flying home to Portland, Oregon.
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The university is ending in-person instruction prior to Thanksgiving and conducting the last week of fall classes and final exams remotely. Students living in campus housing are not allowed to return to the dorms until January, when the next term starts, if they go home for Thanksgiving.
Garcia, 19, said she is wary of travel and felt that completing her coursework at home, in a different time zone, would be too challenging. As a result, she plans to finish the quarter in Chicago and then fly home for the longer winter break because her parents want to see her and she misses the landscape of the Pacific Northwest.
Still, Garcia she said she’s nervous about traveling when the time comes, especially because her airline has started filling all of its seats instead of spacing out passengers. Though Garcia takes a COVID-19 test every week as required by U. of C., she said she might quarantine upon arriving home if the airport feels too crowded.
“If I didn’t absolutely have to be traveling I would not,” said Garcia, a classics and computer science major. “I would really rather not at all. I try not to go many places because I don’t want to risk anything.”
Yamonie Noy tests student Luis Sierra for COVID-19 at the University of Chicago. Students who decide to travel home for Thanksgiving won't be allowed to return to residence halls until after the new year. (Youngrae Kim / Chicago Tribune)
Dr. John Segreti, an infectious disease specialist at Rush University Medical Center, said students traveling home should check the infection rates for both their current location and their final destination. If they’re traveling from an area with higher transmission, they should quarantine for 14 days upon arrival, he said.
“That’s not very convenient, but I think that makes the most sense, especially if you are living with someone who’s got comorbid conditions or is older who, when they do get COVID-19, they are more likely to get more severally ill or potentially even die,” Segreti said. “People have to take all of those things into consideration.”
Some universities say they are trying to reassure communities and act responsibly by mandating that students leaving campus partake in exit testing. Others are offering it voluntarily or continuing to follow the testing programs already in place.
According to Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, which is requiring all undergraduate students, whether symptomatic or not, to test before in-person classes end Friday, the strategy is being used “with the interest of protecting public health as students prepare to leave campus and return to the homes of their parents and families.”
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Students who test positive for COVID-19, or have had close contact with an infected person, can isolate on campus, be picked up and driven home by a family member, or immediately drive themselves home if they have a car on campus.
The school will close dorms Sunday, and they won’t reopen until next semester, Vanderbilt has announced. Students who need to stay on campus, including athletes, international students and housing-insecure students, must apply to remain in university housing.
The University of Notre Dame just outside South Bend, Indiana, is requiring both undergraduate and graduate students to sign up for tests on campus, warning that it will prevent those who don’t comply from registering for classes next semester or obtaining a transcript.
Notre Dame students must schedule a test before Saturday and remain in South Bend until a negative result comes back, the school has said. If they test positive, they cannot leave until the campus health center authorizes it.
But Segreti warned that even with these methods, there’s “no foolproof type of testing” unless students are assessed every day, which would be financially and logistically challenging for institutions. Not all schools procured enough supplies to conduct widespread testing due to shortages this summer.
Segreti and other health professionals have cautioned against the false sense of confidence that negative results can create. It takes two to 12 days for individuals to experience symptoms, and testing might not detect the virus if amounts in the nostrils or saliva are too low during this period, Segreti said.
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“I don’t see how exit testing can be all that effective because the negative test on the day you leave just means you’re not infectious on the day you leave,” Segreti said. “It doesn’t predict what’s going to happen in the next few days to two weeks.”
He acknowledged that testing could help identify some asymptomatic students but underscored that it won’t catch all positive cases.
Dr. Jeffrey Pothof, an emergency medicine physician and chief quality officer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s health system, said exit testing can be helpful as long as students understand the limitations, stressing that a negative result “doesn’t give you a free pass" to act recklessly.
Students should take other preventive actions to avoid spreading the virus over the holidays. That means limiting social activity with groups, wearing face coverings and social distancing as much as possible, Pothof and others said.
“If you plan on going home, you really need to buckle down for that two weeks before you leave,” Pothof said.
Based on lessons learned from the fall, Pothof said it’s possible college students traveling home from areas with high rates of infection could bring the virus to communities that have otherwise seen low caseloads.
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After students moved back to UW-Madison for classes, the virus spiked in areas of the state that hadn’t experienced high rates, perhaps as students commuted back and forth between campus and home, he said.
Carrol Banks gives instructions to student Chaya Halberstam before testing her for COVID-19 at the University of Chicago on Sunday. (Youngrae Kim / Chicago Tribune)
In Illinois in recent days, COVID-19 cases have spiked to levels not seen since the spring, hospitals are filling with COVID-19 patients, and public health experts are advising residents to stay home as much as possible.
With fall break less than a week away, the state’s largest university is ratcheting up its warnings about the risks of traveling.
The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is asking students who leave campus for the fall break that begins Saturday to remain away if possible, though dorms will be open for students who feel they need to be on campus.
As with other colleges trying to discourage travel, all courses will switch to remote delivery after break and finals will be conducted remotely so there’s no need to return until spring semester.
“We are entering another extremely dangerous period as COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations are rising extraordinarily rapidly in our community and state,” Chancellor Robert Jones said in a recent message to students. “Everyone needs to do their part to protect themselves and our community.”
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Though the school’s seven-day case positivity rate remains well below 1%, a figure buoyed by thousands of daily tests conducted with university-developed saliva technology, Jones told students that cases have risen following recent Halloween and football events.
The school is also seeing “a concerning increase” in cases tied to employees and graduate students, though Jones said they appear to stem from outside social activity and not transmission in the classroom.
In the days before break, Jones said students should not host or attend parties and that anyone planning to travel must limit their activities to attending in-person class, getting tested and visiting the pharmacy and grocery store. All undergraduates using campus facilities this fall are already required to test two to three times per week.
Students who return to campus after fall break must test as soon as possible and self-quarantine until results come back. After that, students must test every other day until the semester concludes on Dec. 18.
echerney@chicagotribune.com


chicagotribune--2020-11-17--4 wounded in Dearborn Homes shooting, police say

Four people were standing outside about 7:20 p.m. in the 2700 block of South Dearborn Street on the South Side @ @ @ @ @ walked up to them , police said .
They started fighting and then fired shots @ @ @ @

Four people were injured during a shooting Monday evening at the Dearborn homes, according to Chicago police.
Four people were standing outside about 7:20 p.m. in the 2700 block of South Dearborn Street on the South Side when “unknown offenders” walked up to them, police said. They started fighting and then fired shots at the group.
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An 18-year-old man suffered a graze wound to the right buttocks and refused medical attention, police said. A 22-year-old man was shot in the buttocks and taken to the University of Chicago Medical Center in good condition.
Another 22-year-old man was shot in the foot and taken to the University of Chicago Medical Center in good condition, police said. A 29-year-old man was shot in the left leg and taken to Northwestern Memorial Hospital in good condition.
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No arrests have been made, police said. The shooting is under investigation.
pfry@chicagotribune.com
Twitter @paigexfry