Former candidate for Chicago alderman and local activist David Krupa fears for Illinois should Gov. J.B. Pritzker get everything he wants in his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“The governor’s actions have already caused a lot of businesses to close down a lot of people’s lives to be changed because they were not allowed to have their businesses function as they should have been,” Krupa told Chicago City Wire. "In the end, I think his actions did more harm than good and now he’s talking about taking us back to that same place.”
Citing rising infection rates that have recently soared to the point at least 11 counties are now at “warning levels” for the spread of the virus, Pritzker recently pronounced the state is at a “danger point” for other level of shutdown.
As his been the case for much of the pandemic, Krupa argues the governor is blowing things out of proportion and taking matters out of context.
“If you look at Illinois, the numbers of overall infections are down compared to other states, yet all our businesses were closed down,” he said. “Things like that breed negativity.
As soon as the governor started talking about another shutdown I heard about more businesses deciding they’d had enough and were closing down.”
By now, Krupa said he had hoped that Pritzker would have learned his one-size-fits-all approach to fighting the virus isn’t what’s in the best interest of the whole state.
“The virus is real, but instead of shutting down the entire state we need to be aiming at having the groups most impacted take more precautions instead of just forcing everyone to have to take all these unnecessary ones,” he said. “Yes, people with preconditions and illnesses need to stay home, but my advice would be not to shut down all of Illinois.”
Krupa reasons a second shutdown would be even more crippling than the first one has proved to be.
“Even with everything that the federal government has been doing to keep things afloat it hasn’t been enough to make up for everything,” he said. “What do you think the impact will be now, when many of those resources are no longer available to people?”
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