As pandemic-related restrictions tightened across parts of Illinois last week, small-business owners in this Chicagoland suburb girded themselves for another round of losses, the Wall Street Journal reported. On Friday, restaurants and bars in four counties closed once more to dine-in service under mitigation measures announced by Gov. J.B. Pritzker because of rising COVID-19 cases in every region of Illinois. In Chicago, Mayor Lori Lightfoot instituted a 10 p.m. nightly curfew for nonessential businesses and prohibited bars without a retail food license from serving customers indoors. Many businesses have endured multiple rounds of restrictions around the state, which are instituted whenever a region’s average COVID-19 positivity rate goes above an 8 percent threshold for three consecutive days. On Friday, Illinois health officials put half of the state’s 102 counties on a warning list because they triggered at least two state-set thresholds on indicators the state uses to determine where increased COVID-19 risk is occurring. On Friday, Illinois had 29,088 new COVID-19 cases in the last seven days, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It ranked second behind Texas for U.S. states with the highest number of new cases in the past week.
