CHICAGO, Ill. (WTVO) — Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker says another lockdown is possible as the coronavirus surges in neighboring states.
Pritzker said Illinois is still a long way from another round of shutdowns, and said if it happened again, it wouldn’t be as in favor of big box stores as last year, according to WFLD.
“When you walk into a Walmart, in addition to there being a grocery store, there’s also other things that you could buy. And so I think, certainly in retrospect now, I think what we would say is, ‘if you could have kept the capacity limit appropriate in a smaller venue, it might have kept that open,'” Pritzker said.
“But we were following, in a very unknown environment, with a new coronavirus — the federal government was essentially saying to us, ‘you need to keep these things open and you need to close the other things,'” Pritzker said.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that the delta variant is now the dominant strain of coronavirus in the U.S.
The variant was first identified in India in December of 2020. It was detected in the U.S. in March.
The Chicago Department of Public Health added Florida, Louisiana, Nevada, and the U.S. Virgin Islands to its travel advisory Tuesday, as the country continues to see a steady increase in new COVID-19 cases.
Missouri and Arkansas were added back to the Travel Advisory last week after several weeks of no states surpassing the threshold of 15 cases per day, per 100,000 residents.
Pritzker announced his 2022 re-election campaign on Monday.
