Dr. Emily Landon at the Illinois Governor's COVID-19 Press Conference

good afternoon everyone, first of all I want to send my sincere thanks and support to all healthcare workers in Illinois and around the world, despite doing everything we can to prepare for a respiratory virus pandemic, we now find ourselves facing a new virus with very little. information, not enough personal protective equipment, protocol changes every day and no second chances, University of Chicago Medicine and all other hospitals in the state have been and are working very closely with our public health departments Without these partnerships with each other and with Public Health and the CDC we could not have gotten this far and we won't get much further, so I also ex

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my gratitude to everyone who works in public health, all of us in the field of infectious diseases and the public health community are united in our efforts and I agree with this course of action.

I have spoken with many of my colleagues across the city and state and we all recognize that this is the only way forward. This virus is relentless, it spreads before you know you have contracted it, and it deceives. make you think it's nothing more than a little flu, for many of us it may not be much more than the flu, so it could be very confusing to know why schools are closed, restaurants are closed, and now the virus is taking what remains of our precious freedom, but the real problem is not the 80 percent who will overcome this in a week, but the 20 percent of patients, the elderly, those who are immunocompromised, those who have other medical problems, who They'll need a little more support, some oxygen or maybe. a life-sustaining ventilator, we do incredible things like this to save patients in our American hospitals and around the world every day, but we can't take care of everyone at once and we can't deliver on that promise of low mortality if we can't Provide the support our patients need.

Our health system has no slack. There are no empty rooms waiting for patients or nurses waiting in the wings. We barely have enough masks for the nurses we have, thinking back to last time. There were limited tools and a dangerous infection was spreading rapidly. At the beginning of the 1918 pandemic, two American cities made different decisions about how to proceed and when only a few patients were affected. Louis locked down and sheltered in place, but Philadelphia

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ed ahead with a grand parade to celebrate those going to war. A week later, Philadelphia hospitals were overrun and thousands of people died, many more than in st.

Louis, this is a warning for our times. Things are already difficult in Illinois hospitals, including mine. There is no vaccine or antivirals readily available to help stem the tide. All we have to slow the spread is social distancing and if we allow every patient with this. in fact three more people and then each of them infects two or three more people there won't be a hospital bed when my mother can't breathe very well or when yours is coughing too much so in my house we have made a lot of sacrifices already We're not going out, so this is the first time I've left my house in a few days because I'm leading our emergency efforts and planning from home.

My son has traded sports, a science

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, and fifth grade baking. selling puzzles, e-learning and some video chats, this is not the life any of us expected and there are certainly others who will make much greater sacrifices and there will be many more disappointments to come, but this will not be forever as the

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said. It will last longer than any of us would like, but in the end we will look back and see it as just a part of what happened in our lives and we have to remember that how can football or book club be so dangerous?

Why ask? so many people for just a few hundred cases because it's the only way to save those lives and now is the time because the numbers you see on the news today are the people who got sick a week ago and there are still people today who got sick sick today they haven't even realized they have been sick but they contracted the virus and it will take a week to see that in our numbers expecting the hospitals to be overwhelmed we will leave next weeks patients with nowhere to go In short, without taking drastic measures, the healthy and optimistic among us will condemn the vulnerable.

We have to fight this fire before it grows too big. These extreme restrictions may ultimately seem a little anticlimactic because it's really hard to feel like you're saving. the world when you watch Netflix from your couch, but if we do this right, nothing happens. Yes, a successful shelter in place means you will feel like it was all for nothing and you would be right because nothing means nothing. It happened to your family and that's what we're going to do here, even from now we can't stop the cases from coming fast and furious at least for the next few weeks and in the short term, but with a real commitment to shelter in place and With a lot of patience we can help protect our critical workers who need to use public transportation to get safely from where they need to go to where they need to go.

We can give our factories time to ramp up production of all that PPE so that we have enough masks to last and we can make more medications and learn more about how we can use them to help save more lives, even if it's a little while ago a big time. difference, it will take more than a week to start seeing the rate of increase slow down and it's hard to say, it will take even longer to see the rate come down and infections go down, so please don't give up. I've lived in Illinois my entire life and I know we'll get there. get through this together and find a way back to the life we ​​used to live.

Public health and hospitals have been working hard for a long time and now it's your turn to do your part, a huge sacrifice, but a sacrifice that can make a thousand differences maybe even a difference in your family too.