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 Pritzker Administration public health leaders had 11 days of notices about a
COVID-19 outbreak at the LaSalle Veterans’ Home, but failed to “identify and
respond to the seriousness of the outbreak” as 36 residents eventually died,
according to an audit by Illinois Auditor General Frank Mautino.
Now Illinois House members want answers about the deadly lapse in November 2020.
Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker blasted his predecessor, Gov. Bruce Rauner, for a
delayed response to an outbreak of Legionnaire’s disease in 2015 at the state’s
Quincy veterans’ home that killed 13 residents.
“If at Quincy, three days was too long for IDPH to get on site, what is nearly
two weeks,” said state Rep. Dave Welter, R-Morrisay. “So, this is fatal
mismanagement by the Pritzker administration.”
Illinois Department of Public Health administrators were updated daily on rising
cases, with 32 of the 36 victims testing positive for COVID-19 before the agency
responded on Nov. 12, Mautino’s audit states.
The audit also disproved claims in an earlier report by the Illinois Department
of Human Services’ Office of the Inspector General. DHS concluded the leader of
the Illinois Department of Veterans Affairs failed to sound the alarm about the
outbreak, but the audit found detailed emails to IDPH containing outbreak
information that the IDPH director then used in her daily briefings.
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The DHS report also claimed there was an “absence of any standard operating
procedures in the event of a COVID-19 outbreak” for state veterans’ homes.
Mautino’s audit found hundreds of pages detailing guidelines recommended by IDPH
and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
State lawmakers on both sides of the aisle were upset by the bureaucratic
failures.
Rep. Lance Yednock, D-Ottawa, whose district includes the LaSalle home, said
he’s “frustrated and disappointed there wasn’t better coordination between state
agencies to recognize and address the increasingly serious infection rate at
LaSalle as it was happening.”
When Pritzker was a candidate in 2018, he was debating Rauner and went after him
for the Quincy veterans’ deaths. Pritzker said those veterans should have been a
priority and would be under his leadership.
“It’s our obligation to defend our veterans’ and keep them safe,” Pritzker said. |
