Chicago City Wire

Illinoisans should be prepared to wear masks forever after the state announced the impending release of stage 5 precautions, which include always wearing masks outdoors.

“MASKS for LIFE if you live in Illinois!” Morning Answer co-host Amy Jacobson said in a tweet. "Getting to Phase 5 will take a detour to a 'new' phase 4.5. (Details by end of this week.) But once at Phase 5, ⁦@GovPritzker ⁩will require us to wear MASKS.”

Gov. J.B. Pritzker has been one of the most lockdown-heavy governors in the nation.

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“What is the damn point of being vaccinated and being a healthy person if you still have to wear a mask outside to do anything?” Brian Uhlig said in response to Jacobsen’s tweet. “They continue to treat us like a bunch of idiots.”

Researchers have found masks offer no real protection from COVID-19.

“The edicts that are coming from the [Kentucky] governor and from the governor of Michigan — they’re completely arbitrary,” U.S. Sen. Rand Paul from Kentucky told Fox Business. “They’re not based in any kind of science. There’s really very little objective science to prove that any of this works. In fact, the Danish study on masks shows that objectively, guess what, the cloth masks don’t work, they’re theater.”

In fact, the state GOP has been coalescing around opposition to Pritzker’s “safety measures,” including the mask mandate, and focusing on getting kids back into schools.

Illinois state Sen. Darren Bailey (R-Louisville) has been crisscrossing the state in recent weeks speaking to opponents and rallying parents who want schools to re-open.

"Gov. Pritzker and the political elites, they failed us, they failed our schools, they failed our students, they failed our future,” Bailey said at a recent rally.  

Pritzker critics point to the state of Florida where the mask mandate was dropped in most areas quickly after the initial lockdown was over on June 1, 2020.

As of December, the Covid death rate in Florida — where there are very few Covid restrictions — was 99 per 100,000 population, whereas in Illinois, it was 137 per 100,000 population.

Illinois has enforced one of the most oppressive lockdowns in the nation, resulting in the closure of thousands of businesses and loss of tens of thousands of jobs. While some establishments chose to defy Pritzker and stayed open, in some cases they were targeted by liquor enforcement officials for closure.

The Illinois Restaurant Association said in a statement last fall that Pritzker’s orders were resulting in the demise of the industry.

"Unless the state of Illinois takes a more reasonable approach to mitigation, thousands of restaurants are at risk of permanent closure," the association said in a statement last fall.

Since that time it has been revealed that thousands of small businesses, mainly restaurants, have been wiped out of existence throughout the state, largely due to Pritzker's lockdown. 

In mid-2020, Yelp reported that 2,400 businesses in the Chicago area went out of business after being closed “temporarily” due to Pritzker’s executive orders.  
In August, Yelp reported that 97,966 small businesses had closed nationwide since the beginning of the pandemic. That was up from around 80,000 just a month earlier.