A Chicago Public Schools special education classroom assistant has tested positive for coronavirus, bringing the total number of cases in Illinois to six and ratcheting up local anxiety over a disease that’s spreading fast around the globe.
The patient was a Chicago woman in her 50s who works at Vaughn Occupational High School in Portage Park, officials announced at a City Hall news conference hosted by Mayor Lori Lightfoot and Gov. J.B. Pritzker.
Classes at the school are canceled next week, officials said.
“I want to reassure all of our CPS students and families that our city’s been working relentlessly to protect the safety and security of our students, faculty and staff, along with their friends and loved ones,” Lightfoot said.
The patient is currently hospitalized and had been on the Grand Princess cruise ship, which has been associated with 20 cases, before disembarking on Feb. 21, officials said. She returned to Chicago the week of Feb. 25, and her last day at work was March 2, Lightfoot said.
Vaughn is a specialty school for students with disabilities, CPS CEO Janice Jackson said. It has 212 students, officials said.
“As a specialty school for students with special needs and disabilities, we want to take all possible measures to ensure the health and well-being of these students is the first priority in conjunction with (public health),” Jackson said.
News of another coronavirus case comes after two major conventions have canceled big events in Chicago. Hours earlier, South by Southwest was canceled in Austin, Texas, amid growing concerns over the spreading disease.
Nancy Bender, the mother of a student at Vaughn, said she received a phone call and an email Friday evening notifying her that an employee at her daughter’s school tested positive for coronavirus.
Bender said the email instructed them to remain “self-quarantined” for a week.
“The whole thing causes me a lot of anxiety,” she said.
Despite her frustration, Bender said she doesn’t blame the school and understands why the school is taking precautions to protect everybody.
“The way everything has been playing out, it’s better to be overly cautious.”
Vaughn’s Local School Council chair, Cindy Ok, said a robocall shortly after 6:15 p.m. informed her that a staff member had tested positive, school was canceled through next Friday and CPS was asking all students, families and staff members to stay away from crowded places.
Ok, whose daughter is a senior at Vaughn, said in the hour since the robocall, she had been “frantically writing” texts, Facebook messages and emails in multiple languages to let families know they should stay home. She said she has been told nothing about whether CPS is arranging for any students to be tested for the virus.
“The school is 100% kids with disabilities,” Ok said. “… It’s a very small school, very small, and everybody is in contact almost with everybody at some time of the day. “
She didn’t yet know who the staff member was or if her daughter had been in close contact, but said she hoped CPS would contact those families and provide test kits for those who had been in contact with the staff member. So far, Ok had not heard of any students experiencing symptoms.
“I am going to stay home, cancel everything, I’m telling all of my families at Vaughn that this is very serious and they should stay home and find ways to get people to bring food if they can,” Ok said. She was also thinking ahead of ways to seek help for families who need it.
“I don’t want the families to be driven by fear,” Ok said. “I want them to stay positive. … I am encouraging them to find fun, engaging activities to do together as a family with their student and to keep their students engaged as much as possible.”
The risk to the general public still remains low, Lightfoot said, as officials emphasized that Illinois is well-equipped to handle the disease.
Lightfoot declined to identify the hospital where the woman was being treated, citing the hospital’s request. The city’s public health commissioner, Dr. Allison Arwady, said the city reached out to ensure the woman was tested after receiving notification from the federal government that a Chicago resident had been on the cruise ship.
Jackson said she couldn’t specifically say what kind of work the woman did, but in general, special education classroom assistants are in class helping teachers and students every day.
They are with students during instruction but also provide support “to and from other locations in the building, such as the restroom, the lunchroom.”
“Some of them do assist with feeding and other needs of the students,” Jackson added.
Pritzker reiterated there is a low risk to the public and noted that there have only been six cases in Illinois.
“At least so far we’re in a good place and doing everything we can,” Pritzker said.
City officials said Friday night that they publicized the information about the Vaughn case about an hour after learning of the test result.
But unlike Bender, Mary Hughes, a CPS parent and special education parent liaison with Raise Your Hand, a group that advocates for public education in Illinois and to eliminate inequities in schools, said she learned of the case from the news. The district sent a letter to families citywide around 8 p.m.
“It’s super alarming that it’s at Vaughn high school, that this aide was found to have had the coronavirus, because a school like that might have several students with compromised immune systems,” Hughes said. “There aren’t very many answers except to say that ‘we’ve got it under control.’ Given that they’re releasing this so late on a Friday, I have very little trust that they have it under control.”
In a statement, the Chicago Teachers Union called on the district to “rapidly ramp up its efforts to clean and disinfect all schools throughout the city to prevent the spread of the virus.”
It said the district had assured them that teachers and staff would be paid throughout the quarantine, but noted that families would have to provide care for children who couldn’t go to school. “We urge Mayor Lori Lightfoot and Gov. J.B. Pritzker to ensure they can do so without employment risk or household hardship. No one should lose their job due to this crisis,” the statement said.
Earlier Friday, the fifth Chicago-area patient to test positive for coronavirus was released from the hospital to recover under quarantine at home, according to Rush University Medical Center officials. While the fifth patient is still showing symptoms of the virus, medical providers said in a news release that hospitalization is no longer required.
The hospital did not name the patient. But WGN-TV reported that a 21-year-old Vanderbilt University student from Illinois tested positive for the new disease, which originated in Wuhan, China, and has sickened more than 100,000 across the globe.
President Donald Trump on Friday signed an $8.3 billion emergency measure to fight coronavirus, providing federal public health agencies with money for tests and potential treatments, as well as aid state and local governments in preparing and countering the viral outbreak.
Pritzker said he hopes Illinois will receive funds from the measure “as soon as possible.”
“We’ve been making sure that we’re keeping an accounting of all the expenditures that we’ve made that are specific to dealing with novel coronavirus,” Pritzker said at an earlier news conference Friday. “And so we were very glad.”
U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin on Friday also addressed the state’s coronavirus response — from airport screenings to the availability and affordability of testing kits — at a roundtable with officials from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and local health departments.
“Be prepared, don’t be scared,” said Dr. Jay Butler, the CDC’s enters for Disease Control and Prevention’s deputy director for infectious diseases. “Panic driven by fear is rarely a way to be able to protect health.”
Health experts say the risk of contracting the virus locally remains low.
“That doesn’t negate the fact that there will be additional cases,” said Dr. Ngozi Ezike, director of the Illinois Department of Public Health. “We know that viruses fly. They can come from wherever they are to new locations. … We have to anticipate that we will see more.”
Local health officials say they take part in various drills to prepare for this kind of health epidemic — and one large-scale, federal exercise held last year was eerily similar to the recent coronavirus outbreak.
“Here’s how this exercise was designed: a new virus emerging in China with the first cases seen in Chicago,” Arwady said earlier Friday. “The work that we’ve been doing has absolutely been in line with what those plans look like.”
She added that local officials evaluate everything from protocols for the city’s airports to hospital readiness to the potential for school closures, taking into account residual problems such as feeding children who are typically provided two meals a day at school. They also practice delivering supplies to local hospitals and setting up mobile care units, she said.
“I am confident that we are one of the most prepared cities and one of the most prepared states in this country,” Arwady said. “We never want to see something like this happen, but when we see it happen, we’re not starting from scratch.”
Ezike said she was encouraged by recent news that commercial labs have also begun testing for coronavirus, which might help “ease the burden” for public health agencies.
Illinois was the first state to have on-site coronavirus testing at its public health laboratory and now can test at three sites: Chicago, Springfield and Carbondale. Ezike said another shipment of test kits went out earlier this month.
“I still think it will fall short of the kind of rampant testing that we would like to do, but with the availability of some commercial testing, that would help share the burden,” she said.
She also encouraged the public to get a flu shot. While the flu vaccine doesn’t protect against contracting coronavirus, “there’s a definite intersectionality,” she said.
“If we have (fewer) people getting sick with the flu, that increases the resources, the health care workers, the hospital beds that are available to take care of coronavirus patients, should those numbers increase,” she said.
Chicago Tribune’s Elvia Malagon and Dan Petrella contributed.
