Will County Gazette

Veteran state Rep. Margo McDermed (R-Mokena) wants to see a new approach to COVID-19 by Gov. J.B. Pritzker in Springfield.

“When it comes to his handling of the virus, I think the time has come for a more strategic and surgical approach,” McDermed told the Will County Gazette. “We’ve been using the same approach since March and we have a lot more information now as to what works best. The governor’s not taking that into consideration, if he were there’s no way we’d be back at this point.”

Citing rising infection rates, Pritzker recently reenacted COVID-19 restrictions in several counties and announced he is considering others, sparking nonstop outrage and instant pushback among small business owners across the state already hard hit by earlier shutdowns.

“If you look at the Illinois Department of Public Health’s website, you can see that restaurants are very, very low as a source of transmission for this disease,” McDermed added. “The idea that we’re going to automatically use mitigation efforts on restaurants and bars is ancient history. Now that we have better information we need to use more targeted tactics.”

With a Facebook page dedicated to businesses planning to defy his order already created and launched, the governor is now threatening to send the Illinois State Police to the regions where restaurants and bars are deemed to be in violation.

McDermed argues it’s all misguided aggression.

“We’re demonizing businesspeople for no real reason,” she said. “We need to be putting more resources in areas where the data shows they are needed. Just being consistent for the sake of consistency isn’t what’s most useful, but that’s what you get when you have a czar who is overseeing everything without allowing input from anyone else.”