Commentary: It's been a year now, when we do get back to normal

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by Hilary Gowins, Vice President of Communications
Illinois Policy

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Most people have spent the past year wondering if and when we’ll get back to normal.

Denetta Flamingo is busy dealing with a new normal. It’s one that cost her the home where she raised her children. It’s taken other assets. Those sacrifices have kept her small business alive.

Still, the dream she invested everything in – Ottawa Nautilus Fit24, a gym in Ottawa, Illinois – is up for sale.

"I’m doing the best I can," she said. "Today I’m at the gym and a regular customer who had not been here since March of last year came in. Everyone was in tears. He has M.S. and came in for me to fix his phone and feel the gym out with the new rules. Although I have stayed in touch with him and many others that still haven’t returned, just having him here and seeing him to make sure he was OK means so much. We are a family – new members and old members. We help each other, whether it’s fixing a phone or just lifting each other’s spirits."

The weight of COVID-19 mitigation crushed the small business sector in Illinois. Owners like Denetta Flamingo sold off equipment and other assets to try and remain solvent.

Photo by Victor Freitas/Unsplash

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Nautilus Fit24 has been in business since 1974. Denetta began working at the gym in 2009 and purchased it in 2014 when the previous owner left Illinois.

"How can you let a business that’s been around that long go under?" Denetta said. She’s fighting to keep the gym open, even if that means it’s under new ownership. "A new owner will have the funds to bring this gym back to its prime."

Continuing to fight means struggling. Denetta has been steadily selling off equipment and personal items during the pandemic just to pay her bills. She ultimately had to leverage the equity on her home of 30 years by selling it to keep the business open. She was denied state grant money. She wasn’t eligible for federal Paycheck Protection Program money, either.

There’s a hole in Illinois’ economy. Denetta has been trying to fill her portion with heart and hard work.

Over 11,200 retailers in Illinois were forced to close up shop last year.

Small shops were hit the hardest – 35% of small businesses have closed in Illinois as of March 3, compared to Jan. 1, 2020, according to data from The Opportunity Insights Tracker.

Those retailers represent jobs on a large scale – small businesses have traditionally created the majority of new jobs each year in Illinois. And the loss of these businesses carries worrisome implications for the state’s workforce and its economic recovery more broadly.

So what happens next? How many of the small businesses left standing will survive in the long run?

The short answer is, 2021 will still be a grind.

"With each day that [the government] lets us open up, it is looking better and the weather has been very cooperative," said Kristan Vaughan, who operates Vaughan Hospitality Group, with six Irish pubs across the Chicago area.

It used to be seven pubs.

"We closed one location permanently and are maximizing PPP and Employee Retention Credit, but Illinois still tries to beat the small business when they are down with the property taxes, fee hikes and more," she said.

Those cost burdens are what Illinois needs to get under control. Otherwise, any bounce-back small businesses make will be hindered and likely continue to lag the rest of the Midwest. In Illinois the leisure and entertainment industry, which includes restaurants, lost jobs 61% faster during 2020 than the nation as a whole.

These numbers are a huge problem for Illinois: the people who live and work here, as well as the politicians tasked with running the state. Small businesses are the main job providers in the state – 69% of all new jobs created in Illinois come from firms with fewer than 20 employees.

The pandemic has affected everyone, but the economic fallout has been especially devastating for specific groups. In addition to retailers, restaurant owners and other small business owners, women, working mothers and Black Illinoisans suffered the worst in terms of job losses. So did low-income families – 36% of workers in households earning less than $40,000 lost jobs.

COVID-19 is the reason for devastation of this magnitude. But it’s important to acknowledge that Illinois had been lagging the rest of the country for years on economic gains and opportunities for the people who call the state home, as well as for the people who used to call it home.

If you do what you always did, you’ll get what you always got. If Illinois doesn’t change, it’ll mean more public debt: which drives higher taxes, a decline in services and more people leaving. It’ll also make the odds even longer for business owners trying to survive.

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Hilary Gowins is vice president of communications at the Illinois Policy Institute, a nonpartisan research organization that promotes responsible government and free market principles.

Prep Sports Notebook: SJO VB gets first win, no Unity sports for spell

Spartans open volleyball season with a win

The St. Joseph-Ogden volleyball team opened its 2020-21 season with a 2-0 win over Hoopeston Area at home on Monday.

In both sets, the Spartans played catch-up volleyball after slow starts having to erase 4-1 deficits.

In set one, SJO struggled to keep up falling behind 7-2 on the scoreboard. Kennedi Burnett then hammered back-to-back kills to whittle away at the Cornjerkers' lead. Two serves later she was on the back line hitting well-placed serves tallying a pair aces on two of her three serves, the score now 8-all, before Hoopeston called a timeout.

Two sideouts later, the Spartans would take the lead after a second tie at 9-9 and fight to a 25-15 win.

Much like the first set, SJO trailed until a 7-7 tie on the scoreboard. Another Burnett ace gave the SJO the lead, followed by a tie at 8s. From here, the Spartan offense took control rallying four unanswered points and, never in any real danger of relinquishing their lead, only had to glance over their shoulders once. The team closed out the match rattling off six consecutive points to a 25-13 finish.

Unity athletics on hold

According to an article in The News-Gazette, all sports activities and contests were postponed at Unity this week. Athletic director Scott Hamilton told the Champaign-Urbana paper "that football activities were paused last Friday, followed by those of volleyball and boys’ soccer over the weekend."

Hamilton, who is also the school's head football coach, didn’t cite any specific COVID-19 cases or contact-tracing issues among the Rockets’ spring sports programs that led to this step.

"We felt like pausing everything gave us the best opportunity to keep everybody safe and kind of stop the spread," Hamilton told The News-Gazette, "and get everybody back as soon as we could — and, most importantly, try to keep people safe in our community."

Last Thursday, the number of active cases within The Sentinel's area of coverage dipped to 18, a low not seen since November 13 last fall. As of March 11, the number of active cases reported by the Champaign-Urbana Public Health District has tripled in the six village area. A 15 case spike occurred last Sunday, 14 of them in the three towns in the Unit 7 school district.

With no practices this week, Unity's opening football game scheduled for Saturday against Olympia won't be played. Due to the IHSA's limited season there is little chance for the game to be rescheduled.

Balancing the benefits and risks as scholastic sports comes back

by Laura Ungar
Kaiser Health News

Photo by Brandon Mowinkel/Unsplash

This spring, high school senior Nathan Kassis will play baseball in the shadow of covid-19 — wearing a neck gaiter under his catcher’s mask, sitting 6 feet from teammates in the dugout and trading elbow bumps for hugs after wins.

"We’re looking forward to having a season," said the 18-year-old catcher for Dublin Coffman High School, outside Columbus, Ohio. "This game is something we really love."

Kassis, whose team has started practices, is one of the millions of young people getting back onto ballfields, tennis courts and golf courses amid a decline in covid cases as spring approaches. But pandemic precautions portend a very different season this year, and some school districts still are delaying play — spurring spats among parents, coaches and public health experts across the nation.

Since fall, many parents have rallied for their kids to be allowed to play sports and objected to some safety policies, such as limits on spectators. Doctors, meanwhile, haven’t reached a consensus on whether contact sports are safe enough, especially indoors. While children are less likely than adults to become seriously ill from covid, they can still spread it, and those under 16 can’t be vaccinated yet.

Less was known about the virus early in the pandemic, so high school sports basically stopped last spring, starting up again in fits and spurts over the fall and winter in some places. Some kids turned to recreational leagues when their school teams weren’t an option.

But now, according to the National Federation of State High School Associations, public high school sports are underway in every state, though not every district. Schedules in many places are being changed and condensed to allow as many sports as possible, including those not usually played in the spring, to make up for earlier cancellations.

Coaches and doctors agree that playing sports during a pandemic requires balancing the risk of covid with benefits such as improved cardiovascular fitness, strength and mental health. School sports can lead to college scholarships for the most elite student athletes, but even for those who end competitive athletics with high school, the rewards of playing can be extensive. Decisions about resuming sports, however, involve weighing the importance of academics against athletics, since adding covid risks from sports could jeopardize in-person learning during the pandemic.

Tim Saunders, executive director of the National High School Baseball Coaches Association and coach at Dublin Coffman, said the pandemic has taken a significant mental and social toll on players. In a May survey of more than 3,000 teen athletes in Wisconsin, University of Wisconsin researchers found that about two-thirds reported symptoms of anxiety and the same portion reported symptoms of depression. Other studies have shown similar problems for students generally.

"You have to look at the kids and their depression," Saunders said. "They need to be outside. They need to be with their friends."

Before letting kids play sports, though, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said, coaches and school administrators should consider things like students’ underlying health conditions, the physical closeness of players in the specific sport and how widely covid is spreading locally.

Karissa Niehoff, executive director of the high school federation, has argued that spring sports should be available to all students after last year’s cancellations. She said covid spread among student athletes — and the adults who live and work with them — is correlated to transmission rates in the community.

"Sports themselves are not spreaders when proper precautions are in place," she said.

Still, outbreaks have occurred. A January report by CDC researchers pointed to a high school wrestling tournament in Florida after which 38 of 130 participants were diagnosed with covid. (Fewer than half were tested.) The report’s authors said outbreaks linked to youth sports suggest that close contact during practices, competitions and related social gatherings all raise the risk of the disease and “could jeopardize the safe operation of in-person education.”

Dr. Kevin Kavanagh, an infection control expert in Kentucky who runs the national patient safety group Health Watch USA, said contact sports are "very problematic," especially those played indoors. He said heavy breathing during exertion could raise the risk of covid even if students wear cloth masks. Ideally, he said, indoor contact sports should not be played until after the pandemic.

"These are not professional athletes," Kavanagh said. "They’re children."

A study released in January by University of Wisconsin researchers, who surveyed high school athletic directors representing more than 150,000 athletes nationally, bolsters the idea that indoor contact sports carry greater risks, finding a lower incidence of covid among athletes playing outdoor, non-contact sports such as golf and tennis.

Overall, "there’s not much evidence of transmission between players outdoors," said Dr. Andrew Watson, lead author of the study, which he is submitting for peer-reviewed publication.

Students, for their part, have quickly adjusted to pandemic requirements, including rules about masks, distancing and locker rooms.

~ Matt Troha

Dr. Jason Newland, a pediatrics professor at Washington University in St. Louis, said all sorts of youth sports, including indoor contact sports such as basketball, can be safe with the right prevention measures. He supported his daughter playing basketball while wearing a mask at her Kirkwood, Missouri, high school.

Doctors also pointed to other safety measures, such as forgoing locker rooms, keeping kids 6 feet apart when they’re not playing and requiring kids to bring their own water to games.

"The reality is, from a safety standpoint, sports can be played," Newland said. "It’s the team dinner, the sleepover with the team — that’s where the issue shows up. It’s not the actual games."

In Nevada’s Clark County School District, administrators said they’d restart sports only after students in grades 6-12 trickle back for in-person instruction as part of a hybrid model starting in late March. Cases in the county have dropped precipitously in recent weeks, from a seven-day average of 1,924 cases a day on Jan. 10 to about 64 on March 3.

In early April, practices for spring sports such as track, swimming, golf and volleyball are scheduled to begin, with intramural fall sports held in April and May. No spectators will be allowed.

Parents who wanted sports to start much earlier created Let Them Play Nevada, one of many groups that popped up to protest the suspension of youth athletics. The Nevada group rallied late last month outside the Clark County school district’s offices shortly before the superintendent announced the reopening of schools to in-person learning.

Let Them Play Nevada organizer Dennis Goughnour said his son, Trey, a senior football player who also runs track, was "very, very distraught" this fall and winter about not playing.

With the reopening, he said, Trey will be able to run track, but the intramural football that will soon be allowed is "a joke," essentially just practice with a scrimmage game.

"Basically, his senior year of football is a done deal. We are fighting for maybe one game, like a bowl game for the varsity squad at least," he said. "They have done something, but too little, too late."

Goughnour said Let Them Play is also fighting to have spectators at games. Limits on the numbers of spectators have riled parents across the nation, provoking "a ton of pushback," said Niehoff, of the high school federation.

Parents have also objected to travel restrictions, quarantine rules and differing mask requirements. In Orange County, Florida, hundreds of parents signed a petition last fall against mandatory covid testing for football players.

Students, for their part, have quickly adjusted to pandemic requirements, including rules about masks, distancing and locker rooms, said Matt Troha, assistant executive director of the Illinois High School Association.

Kassis, the Ohio baseball player, said doing what’s required to stay safe is a small price to pay to get back in the game.

"We didn’t get to play at all last spring. I didn’t touch a baseball this summer," he said. "It’s my senior year. I want to have a season and I’ll be devastated if we don’t."