Chamber Members:
Welcome back from the Thanksgiving weekend as we close out the month of November. Special thanks are in order to all of you who continue to read the daily updates from start to finish, those that scan over, and those that try to keep up when possible. Today’s update is going to catch up on some announcements and information over the past few days with a heavy emphasis on vaccine news.
*Daily Coronavirus update brought to you by Silver Cross Hospital
Added Restrictions to Remain Regardless of Rates
Governor Pritzker said stricter Tier 3 coronavirus mitigation measures will remain in place across Illinois until mid-December at least, as health officials warn of a potential surge in COVID-19 cases caused by travel over the Thanksgiving holiday.
Illinois has seen a trend of declining COVID-19 test positivity rates and hospitalizations in recent days. If this trend continued, Chicago and some other regions appeared to be days away from qualifying for stricter Tier 3 mitigation measures to be rolled back.
Health experts including Dr. Anthony Fauci say a “surge upon a surge” of the coronavirus is likely in the coming weeks due to Thanksgiving travel, Pritzker said the restrictions will remain in place even if a region qualifies for them to be lifted. “We are still very much in a precarious place and we have got to take the time to evaluate any Thanksgiving effect before we make any premature adjustments,” Pritzker said. The Governor said regions could potentially move to Tier 2 in time for the December holidays.
Congress is Back
There is a possibility that this is the only week that both the House and Senate will be in D.C. for the lame-duck session of Congress. With that said, there are 11 days for them to put together a spending bill. That bill can either be an omnibus or a stopgap measure to avoid a shutdown here in the last month of the year.
While Republicans and Democrats have agreed to the top-line numbers, there remain significant details to be negotiated. There is also increased pressure from lawmakers in both parties to include economic stimulus measures like the Paycheck Protection Program in the spending bill even if a broader consensus over state and local funding can’t be reached. Look for lawmakers to publicly call on their leaders not to adjourn until that happens.
Where the negotiations (still) stand: Republicans are pushing for a roughly $500 billion bill. Democrats are eyeing a bill closer to $2.2 trillion.
Vaccine #2
Moderna Inc. said it would ask U.S. and European health regulators today to authorize use of its Covid-19 vaccine, after it was shown to be 94.1% effective in a full analysis of a pivotal study. The timing keeps the vaccine on track to become possibly the second to go into use in the U.S. by year’s end with inoculation available to the general public likely in spring or summer. Moderna said some doses also could become available in Europe in December.
In the 30,000-person trial, 196 subjects developed Covid-19 with symptoms after receiving either the vaccine or a placebo, Moderna said. Of those, 185 had taken a placebo, while only 11 had gotten the vaccine, indicating it protects against the disease. Moderna also said the vaccine appeared to be generally safe, though some subjects developed headaches and other mild to moderate reactions.
If the U.S. Food and Drug Administration clears the shot, distribution could start within weeks. Moderna expects a panel of outside experts advising the FDA to meet Dec. 17 to review the evidence for the company’s vaccine and vote on whether to recommend that the agency authorize its emergency use.
Moderna’s vaccine, like the one from Pfizer and BioNTech, uses a gene-based technology known as messenger RNA after the molecules that carry DNA instructions for making proteins. The vaccines carry genetic code that teaches human cells how to produce a protein resembling the spike protein found on the surface of the coronavirus.
United Begins Flying Pfizer’s Covid-19 Vaccine
United Airlines Holdings Inc. on Friday began operating charter flights to position doses of Pfizer Inc.’s Covid-19 vaccine for quick distribution if the shots are approved by regulators, according to people familiar with the matter.
The initial flights are one link in a global supply chain being assembled to tackle the logistical challenge of distributing Covid-19 vaccines. Pfizer has been laying the groundwork to move quickly if it gets approval from the Food and Drug Administration and other regulators world-wide.
Pfizer’s distribution plan also includes refrigerated storage sites at the drug maker’s final-assembly centers in Kalamazoo, Mich., and Puurs, Belgium, and expanding storage capacity at distribution sites in Pleasant Prairie, Wis., and in Karlsruhe, Germany, in addition to dozens of cargo flights and hundreds of truck trips each day.
United plans to fly chartered cargo flights between Brussels International Airport and Chicago O’Hare International Airport to support distribution of the vaccine, according to a Nov. 24 letter from the Federal Aviation Administration viewed by The Wall Street Journal. The FAA said in a statement Friday that it was supporting the “first mass air shipment of a vaccine,” and that it is working with airlines to safely transport Covid-19 vaccines.
United had sought permission to carry more dry ice than is typically allowed on flights to maintain the extremely low temperatures required to prevent Pfizer’s vaccine from spoiling. The FAA said it would allow United to carry 15,000 pounds of dry ice per flight—five times more than normally permitted. Regulators restrict the amount of dry ice that can be carried on passenger jets because they typically lack equipment to monitor and mitigate any leaked carbon dioxide.
Pfizer designed suitcase-size boxes packed with dry ice to keep its vaccine doses cold, avoiding the larger, temperature-controlling containers used in transportation, giving it more flexibility to ship the vaccines faster.
Last week, Pfizer requested U.S. authorization for emergency use of the Covid-19 vaccine it developed with BioNTech SE of Germany. The FDA has scheduled a Dec. 10 meeting for a panel of outside advisers to help review the evidence behind Pfizer’s request and vote whether to recommend that the vaccine be cleared for broad use in the U.S. The FDA could make that determination soon after the advisory panel’s vote, setting up the potential for the start of distribution by mid-December.
After Admitting Mistake, AstraZeneca Faces Difficult Questions About Its Vaccine
The announcement this week that a cheap, easy-to-make coronavirus vaccine appeared to be up to 90 percent effective was greeted with jubilation. “Get yourself a vaccaccino,” a British tabloid celebrated, noting that the vaccine, developed by AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford, costs less than a cup of coffee.
But since unveiling the preliminary results, AstraZeneca has acknowledged a key mistake in the vaccine dosage received by some study participants, adding to questions about whether the vaccine’s apparently spectacular efficacy will hold up under additional testing.
Scientists and industry experts said the error and a series of other irregularities and omissions in the way AstraZeneca initially disclosed the data have eroded their confidence in the reliability of the results.
Officials in the United States have noted that the results were not clear. It was the head of the flagship federal vaccine initiative — not the company — who first disclosed that the vaccine’s most promising results did not reflect data from older people.
AstraZeneca was the third company this month to report encouraging early results on a coronavirus vaccine candidate. At first glance on Monday morning, the results looked promising. Depending on the strength at which the doses were given, the vaccine appeared to be either 90 percent or 62 percent effective. The average efficacy, the developers said, was 70 percent.
Almost immediately, though, there were doubts about the data.
The regimen that appeared to be 90 percent effective was based on participants receiving a half dose of the vaccine followed a month later by a full dose; the less effective version involved a pair of full doses. AstraZeneca disclosed in its initial announcement that fewer than 2,800 participants received the smaller dosing regimen, compared with nearly 8,900 participants who received two full doses.
The biggest questions were, why was there such a large variation in the effectiveness of the vaccine at different doses, and why did a smaller dose appear to produce much better results? AstraZeneca and Oxford researchers said they did not know.
Crucial information was also missing. The company said that the early analysis was based on 131 symptomatic Covid-19 cases that had turned up in study participants. But it did not break down how many cases were found in each group of participants — those who received the half-strength initial dose, the regular-strength initial dose and the placebo.
State Plans to Borrow $2 Billion from Federal Program
Governor Pritzker announced the state would give notice to the federal government that it plans to borrow $2 billion from a federal program created in response to the COVID-19 pandemic in an effort to fill the state’s budget deficit.
That figure is less than the $5 billion in short-term borrowing authorized by the Illinois General Assembly in May when it passed legislation allowing the state to tap into the Federal Reserve’s Municipal Liquidity Facility program. The program permits the central bank to buy the debt of state and local governments that are in need of funds.
The MLF program was approved as part of the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security, or CARES Act, which is a $2.2 trillion stimulus package passed by Congress in March. Pritzker said the $2 billion will be used to cover revenue losses and unforeseen COVID-19 expenses for this current fiscal year.
The state previously borrowed $1.2 billion from the Fed’s MLF program to cover losses from the last quarter of the previous fiscal year and is the only state that has borrowed from the MLF thus far. The state has paid $200 million toward the first $1.2 billion federal loan, according to Pritzker’s spokesperson. The interest rate incurred on the $1.2 billion loan was 3.82%.
“Although the General Assembly authorized as much as $5 billion of borrowing from the Federal Reserve, I am very reluctant to saddle our state with that large amount of short-term debt. I believe it would be irresponsible to borrow that entire amount, given the persistent fiscal pain it would cause over the next three years, as we would struggle to repay that entire amount,”
Pritzker said. “Our collective intention is to repay this line of credit as early as possible, after either the awarding of stimulus by Congress or a sufficient recovery of state revenues.”
Governor Pritzker said the goal of the short-term borrowing is to continue managing the
state’s massive bill backlog, which has reached more than $7 billion as of last week, according to the Illinois Comptroller’s Office.
Contact Tracing in Illinois
Contact tracing for COVID-19 has gotten off to a slow start in Illinois, with the state still short of its initial goal of 3,800 people doing that work. And now, with infections soaring, caseloads are overwhelming tracers’ ability to slow the spread of the virus by tracking down contacts and getting them to quarantine.
Since the start of the pandemic, Dr. John Schneider has interviewed more than 100 people with COVID-19, and in nearly all cases he managed to pin down how they got infected. “I think there’s one person I’ve had who said, ‘I don’t know how I got it,’” said Schneider, an infectious disease specialist affiliated with the University of Chicago who is director of the 55th Street Howard Brown Clinic, where he also does case investigations and contact tracing. Schneider says the man did visit a barbershop, so they are checking to see if that might be the source.
“But everyone else is like, ‘Oh yeah, so-and-so and so-and-so is sick now too.’ Or ‘so-and-so got tested and they were positive too,’” Schneider continued. “They all know how they got it. They got it from someone in their friendship, or in their household network, who got it from work or some other mechanism.”
Experts on contact tracing say that using contact tracing data in this way is valid and part of the reason contact tracing is done in the first place, particularly when cases are surging.
When case levels are higher, “understanding where people have gotten infected is going to help us understand what are the risky places or risky activities that can inform what kind of response we want to do,” said Jaline Gerardin, assistant professor of preventive medicine at McCormick School of Engineering at Northwestern University.
There are limitations. Sometimes, despite Schneider’s experience on the South Side, it’s hard to pin down where and how a person was infected, making it difficult to identify outbreaks. Tracers also gather information on places visited by infected people — so-called exposure data — but whether those places are truly unsafe can be a matter of interpretation. And in Illinois, the data is far from complete, both because the state’s system for tracking the data is still developing and because some populous areas of the state aren’t even close to conducting contact tracing on every case.
For example, the state is getting only rudimentary contact-tracing information from Schneider’s work at Howard Brown at this point because of the limitations of Chicago’s own database, Schneider said. The city and state databases are not collecting all the same information and aren’t yet fully communicating, officials confirmed. Across Illinois, less than half of people with COVID-19 diagnoses were interviewed by case investigators from Aug. 1 to Nov. 21%, according to state data. The lowest interview rates were in Chicago, which was at 16%, and Cook County, with only 12% of infected people interviewed.
Here in Will and Kankakee counties (Region 7), a total of 31,620 confirmed cases exist and only 35% have been interviewed. This is the third lowest rate out of the 11 regions with Chicago (Region 11) and Suburban Cook (Region 10) being the two lowest.
The state first posted some contact tracing data on Nov. 6, showing what percentage of infected people case investigators tried to reach and the percentage they actually did reach, broken down by regions of the state and also its 97 public health departments. The information, kept by the Illinois Department of Public Health, is updated each Friday.
In all, case investigators — the workers who reach out to infected people in the first step of the contact tracing process — tried to contact 58% of the 461,500 people who contracted COVID-19 between Aug. 1 and Nov. 14. They actually talked to 44% of them. The data also shows that contact tracers reached out to 75% of the 301,333 people who were identified through case investigation as having prolonged, close contact with infected people. In the end, they talked to 64% of the contacts, the data indicates.
The posted data includes information on outbreak locations, or places at which five or more infected people from different households had been within a 14-day period. Those cases cannot be linked to another source of infection.
The top five outbreak locations since July 1 — when Pritzker lifted many early pandemic restrictions — were factories, group homes, community events, correctional facilities and colleges. In the past 30 days, the top five were group homes, correctional facilities, factories, senior or supportive living facilities and business or retail locations. The specific locations are not identified.
The new data on the IDPH can be found here: http://dph.illinois.gov/covid19/outbreak-locations?regionID=7&rPeriod=2
Program Notices & Reminders
Village of Shorewood Announces CARES Small Business Relief Program – Deadline to apply is this Friday, December 4th!
The goal of the Shorewood CARES Small Business Relief Program (“Program”) is to provide financial support for the most impacted Shorewood small businesses in order to support their continued success as they navigate the coronavirus pandemic into 2021. Providing a monthly reimbursement for payroll and rent/mortgage (two of the most expensive operating costs) through this Program will ensure that business owners are not only able to keep the business open but also to focus on the future of their business. This Program coupled with the 2021 Business Fee Waivers are intended to encourage business owners to look to the future and set the stage for a successful new year.
Learn more about the program by clicking here – http://vil.shorewood.il.us/business/COVID-19/shorewood_cares.aspx
ComEd Bill Assistance
Small-business customers can visit ComEd.com/SmallBizAssistance or call 1-877-4-COMED-1 (1-877-426-6331) to learn more or apply for the Small Business Assistance Program.
ComEd’s bill-assistance programs also include flexible payment options for residents, financial assistance for past-due balances and usage alerts for current bills. Any customer who is experiencing a hardship or difficulty with their electric bill should call ComEd immediately at 1-800-334-7661 (1-800-EDISON-1), Monday through Friday from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. to learn more and enroll in a program.
Business Interruption Grant
Funds still remain and the program is still open for application. Please visit:
https://www2.illinois.gov/dceo/SmallBizAssistance/Pages/C19DisadvantagedBusGrants.aspx
SBA EIDL
Low-interest Economic Injury Disaster Loans (EIDLs) from the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) are still available to Illinois small businesses, small agricultural cooperatives, small aquaculture businesses and private nonprofit organizations.
The SBA has opened a Virtual Business Recovery Center to apply online using the Electronic Loan Application via the SBA’s secure website at https://DisasterLoanAssistance.sba.gov/. Business owners and residents should contact the SBA Customer Service Representatives at
(800) 659-2955 for assistance in completing their applications. Requests for SBA disaster loan program information may be obtained by emailing FOCE-Help@sba.gov.
Tell Congress to Make PPP Loans Deductible – Call to Action
The Paycheck Protection Program Flexibility Act of 2020, or PPP, was passed in order to provide small businesses across the United States crucial relief during widespread government shutdowns due to the COVID-19 pandemic. These loans can be forgivable when proceeds are used for payroll, rent, mortgage interest and utilities. Congressional leaders intended for PPP funded expenses to be deductible like other business expenses.
Despite the intent of Congressional leaders, additional legislation is needed to make PPP funds used to pay business expenses deductible. The failure to allow these deductions will have a devastating impact on small businesses struggling to keep their doors open and retain their employees.
Are you a small business owner who thought salary and expenses paid by PPP loans would be deductible? In partnership with the Small Business Advocacy Council (SBAC), we’re asking you to please contact your Congressional leaders and ask them to sponsor and strongly advocate for legislation that makes salary and other businesses expenses paid for by a PPP loan deductible!
You can contact your Senators and House Representative here: https://oneclickpolitics.global.ssl.fastly.net/messages/edit?promo_id=10057
See below for two articles for further information / aid on PPP forgiveness and deductibility
7 Resources for PPP Loan Forgiveness Help
https://www.uschamber.com/co/run/business-financing/ppp-loan-forgiveness-resources?utm_medium=Email&utm_source=SFMC&utm_campaign=MO_Newsletter&utm_content=2020_11_25
Will You Owe Taxes on Your Paycheck Protection Loan?
https://www.uschamber.com/co/run/finance/tax-implications-of-paycheck-protection-loans
SBDC at JJC Update
Here is a list of upcoming programs delivered from the Small Business Development Center through Joliet Junior College:
E-Commerce Webinar – Third Party Platforms to Sell Your Product
Date: 12/3/20
Time: 5:00 PM – 6:00 PM (CST)
E-commerce – Third Party Platforms to Sell Your Product Louis Kreppert has sold over $500,000 of product using platforms like Amazon, Facebook, eBay, and Google Merchant. Learn how to sell your products where the eyeballs are – without paying for advertising. https://ilsbdc.ecenterdirect.com/events/33413
Funding Your Business
Date: 12/8/20
Time: 4:00 PM – 5:00 PM (CST)
Funding your business is critical for start-ups as well as companies who are looking to expand. Establishing business credit is the first step. Get a basic understanding of what banks look for to qualify for a loan from Nancy Kuzma of Old Plank Trail Community Bank/Wintrust Community Bank. https://ilsbdc.ecenterdirect.com/events/33653
Video Marketing for Small Business
Date: 12/10/20
Time: 4:00 PM – 5:00 PM (CST)
Video production once meant bringing in a full production crew to produce a television commercial. Now, a child can produce a quality video on their phone. And that video is a very important component to your website, social media pages, product information, as well as your local advertising. Learn the benefits of video marketing and hear from Mike Puglitsch at Acclaim Media about how easy the process can be. https://ilsbdc.ecenterdirect.com/events/33572
Website Development
Date: 12/15/20
Time: 3:00 PM – 4:00 PM (CST)
A website is more than just a placeholder to occupy property in cyberspace. Your website should be the central point that your social media, SEO, email marketing, pay per click ads, content, CRM…. orbit around to generate business for your business. Join Jason McCoy from WSI to discuss how to develop a website that meets your needs. https://ilsbdc.ecenterdirect.com/events/33652
21 Topics in 21 Minutes for 2021 Growth
Date: Scheduled one-on-one session
In less than 30 minutes, the Illinois Small Business Development Center at Joliet Junior College will help you prioritize key 2021 business plans whether it is for your people, your product, your marketing, your sales, your money or the impact of this crisis. In this short, one-on-one exercise, we will help you determine up to three of the biggest opportunities for growth in the year ahead. We will offer no-cost tools to develop your strategy for success in those areas. Email us at SBDC@JJC.edu and we will send you a link for registration.
Business Services Webinar from the Workforce Center of Will County
Join this Webinar to learn how the Workforce Center can assist your business with resources you need to find, hire, and retain hard-working employees.
Wednesday, December 9, 2020 from 8:30 a.m. – 9:30 a.m.
To register for the webinar please click on the link below:
https://bit.ly/36e7yY8
Finally, we will host our next Virtual Conference on Thursday, December 10th.
Town Hall Meeting – A follow up on the last 6 months
Please join the Joliet Chamber for an interactive virtual conference with community leaders from various business sectors including education, healthcare, and governmental affairs, for a follow-up conversation to the last Town Hall Meeting.
Panel of Speakers will include Dr. Arvid Johnson from the University of St. Francis, Ruth Colby from Silver Cross Hospital, Sue Olenek from the Will County Health Department, Barry Kolanowski from Senior Services Center, and Mike Paone from the Joliet Chamber. Here is the link to register: http://jolietchamber.chambermaster.com/events/details/2020-webinar-december-10-town-hall-meeting-5978
Stay well,
Joliet Region Chamber of Commerce & Industry Staff and Board of Directors
Mike Paone
Vice President – Government Affairs
Joliet Region Chamber of Commerce & Industry
mpaone@jolietchamber.com
815.727.5371 main
815.727.5373 direct