The Omicron variant has triggered “massive community spread” in Chicago, though without “severe outcomes that we had feared,” Mayor Lori Lightfoot said Monday, defending her proof of vaccination requirement for entertainment venues.
Starting Monday, patrons at Chicago restaurants, bars and gyms must show proof of vaccination and a photo ID before dining, drinking or exercising indoors.
Weekly testing will be enough for employees of those establishments. Lightfoot agreed those workers don’t have to prove their vaccination status, a concession made to avoid exacerbating staff shortages that have already forced restaurant patrons to wait longer for their food orders.
During a live interview Monday on CNBC, Lightfoot was asked why she is requiring restaurants, bars and other entertainment venues to go through the trouble and expense of checking vaccine cards and IDs when most people who test positive for the Omicron variant are experiencing only mild symptoms.
“While we’re not seeing the kind of severe outcomes that we had feared, the fact of the matter is, we have massive community spread. Which means people are getting sick. People aren’t able to go to work. And our hospitals are filling up, particularly with people who are unvaccinated,” the mayor said.
“So we’re taking these steps as a mitigation effort. And what we’re hearing from, particularly business people, is that they want to create a safe environment and they’re grateful for us imposing this vaccination mandate in entertainment venues — restaurant, bars, gyms and the like.”
Asked whether her primary motivation is to stop the Omicron variant from spreading or if it is to increase “vaccine uptake,” Lightfoot replied: “It’s a little of both.” She pointed to what happened over the summer, when Chicago welcomed the return of Lollapalooza in Grant Park.
“People got vaccinated. We required a vaccination in order to get inside of the Lollapalooza footprint and, on every single day [of the festival], we had 90-plus percent of the people in there with the vaccine,” she said.
“The answer to everything related to the virus and Omicron is vaccine, vaccine, vaccine.”
Lightfoot said she expects the Omicron variant to peak “certainly by mid-January, if not a little later,” with a majority of downtown office workers returning to their desks “by the end of January going into February.”
Toward the end of last year, Chicago’s “big office towers” had roughly 45% occupancy. A lot of companies “had planned to bring their workers back” this week, but have “pushed it back one or two weeks because of Omicron,” the mayor said.
“There’s a lot of ancillary businesses that depend upon that foot traffic. Whether it’s the lunch place, the shoe shine, the pharmacies, the dry cleaners. All of those businesses have taken a hit because we’re not seeing the traffic of people coming downtown and working,” she said.
“We continue to work with our business partners to do everything we can to get their workforces vaccinated. To make sure there’s adequate testing resources and to keep sending the message that the city is safe and they’ve got to bring people back. … I think we’ll get people back to work by the end of January going into February.”
Twice during the pandemic, restaurants and bars were forced to closed their doors to indoor patrons. In between, they suffered through varying capacity limits.
Asked whether future lockdowns were off the table, the mayor said: “Our goal is to make sure that we never shut down again. It was devastating for our economy, our small business people and employees. If we have to do that, certainly I’m not gonna take that off the table. But, my goal is that we never get to that place.”
