“The governor continues to move the goalposts,” Mayor Keith Pekau said. “This is about control and power and not about science and data. His restrictions targeting restaurants are capricious …”

Region 3 includes Lincoln on the east edge, Springfield, Jacksonville and west to Quincy. “Today, we’re having it come home to roost where we’re going to get businesses in our districts to shut down because the governor has refused to put the same weight on the economic damage of COVID that he’s doing on the health side of COVID,” said Rep. Tim Butler, who is quarantining in his basement after testing positive for COVID-19 last weekend.

“None of my reasons for leaving are new. If you live in the city or the state, you know what has been going on for a long time. And if you don’t, you are as naive as I was at 22 when I moved here bright-faced and bright-eyed.”

Mark Konkol: “The public records suggest Pritzker’s administration at some point decided to rely heavily on the work of scientists without public health expertise to determine his course for combating COVID-19. That only strengthens suspicion that politics may have scrubbed too much science from the data and research that Illinois’ governor says guides him.”

37 dining establishments in McHenry County that are asking a judge to stay open past Friday night. The suit will go before a judge Friday morning at 10 a.m.

“After a diligent discussion, the board has made the decision today to follow the recommendation of the IHSA’s Sports Medicine Advisory Committee as it relates to basketball,” the IHSA said in a statement. “The board has not been presented any causal evidence that rising COVID-19 cases make basketball more dangerous to play by the IDPH or any other health organization, nationally or internationally.”

Dr. Emily Landon, infectious disease expert at University of Chicago Medicine, said the spreading is not the fault of any particular restaurant, but rather that the spread is inevitable. “The reality is, that restaurant can be perfectly safe from 6 to 8 p.m. and become a super spreader event from 8 to 10. It all depends on whether or not someone with COVID walks in the door.”

Director Brendan Kelly said state police have been taking part in readiness exercises with state and local partners. Terrorism intelligence is monitoring possible issues.

Five Chicago-area Democratic lawmakers wrote a letter to the governor that raised concerns about continued restrictions on businesses. “These measures will result in permanent closure of countless restaurants, eliminating thousands of jobs and hurting our communities. We cannot allow this to happen.” Another, State Rep. LaShawn Ford said, “Taxpayers deserve to be included in this process so they can share their data as well.”

Springfield District 186 School Board President Scott McFarland said allowing basketball would be a difficult decision. “I’m disappointed that IHSA punted in basically saying ‘yeah, we’re going to do it, but it’s up to the school boards,’ but I guess the school boards are going to have to be the adults in the room, so that’s what we’re going to do.”

That’s a 13% increase from the week before, when there were 46,948 new unemployment claims were filed across the state the week of Oct. 12, and a 540% increase over the number of claims filed in the same week last year.

Several sources say Illinois Department of Public Health Director Ngozi Ezike got an ear full from lawmakers and mayors on the call Thursday morning. Region 3 includes Adams, Brown, Calhoun, Cass, Christian, Greene, Hancock, Jersey, Logan, Macoupin, Mason, Menard, Montgomery, Morgan, Pike, Sangamon, Schuyler and Scott counties.

Kristan Vaughan’s family already gave up one and is trying to sell a second of their seven Irish pubs in the Chicago area. She is also exploring moving out of Illinois, but her inability to sell the restaurants for what is owed is keeping her here. “I was just thinking we could ink our way through to April when it’s warm again, but I guess I let myself start to believe too soon.”

“Lightfoot initially promised to reform fines and penalties in the city because she said they focused on getting revenue and not on making the community safer. She appears to be abandoning that promise, with her latest budget proposal bringing in $38 million more than the projection for 2020.”

“With less than one week until the election, let’s review the cavalcade of errors, half-truths, and dumbfounded observations that have been made in favor of the Fair Tax over the past year.”

“There’s no explicable reason why a task force meant solely to identify whether the state could shore up the funding level of its public pensions via asset transfers, would involve city governments, especially when the Illinois Municipal Retirement Fund is nearly fully-funded.”

Illinois, with the worst finances of any state, has been banking on billions in federal funding. Since the pandemic, Illinois’s total retirement and debt liabilities are on track to make up 45% of the state’s gross domestic product by June 2021, up from 35% in 2019, according to Moody’s Investors Service. Illinois was one of only two borrowers to tap loans offered from the Federal Reserve as part of the aid packages.

Region 6, which has the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, has the best positivity rate in the state sitting at a 2.8% positivity rate. However, if data from the university is removed, that rate jumps to 8.1%.

In Kane County, where more than 16,500 residents have contracted COVID-19 so far, spokeswoman Susan Stack said it would be difficult to make assumptions about locations identified during contact tracing. An average of about 12% of respondents answered a question about locations during the contact tracing process, meaning the majority of people did not have an answer, she said.

“A majority of us small town mayors feel that it is vital to keep restaurants open,” said Morton Grove Mayor Dan DiMaria. The mayors of Libertyville and Itasca said they won’t enforce the state ban on indoor dining.