South Cook News

Village of Orland Park Trustee Jim Dodge is hoping cooler heads will prevail in the battle to resurrect Illinois from the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Clearly everybody in Illinois wants to get this right,” Dodge, a former Republican candidate for state treasurer, told the South Cook News. “This is defined as making the best decision for our state that you can under uncertainty and complexity. I think plans are evolving as data is becoming clearer and my hope is we can find a trend that seems sensible in the data.”

With countless small business owners feeling squeezed by the extension of a statewide stay-at-home order Gov. J.B. Pritzker and his threatening to have law enforcement “take action” to enforce it against those who seek to reopen their businesses sooner than his executive order lays out, Dodge knows that won’t come easy.

“I think if you look at the numbers, there’s data that shows if we thoughtfully approach this and individuals maintain social distancing and other precautions, we can take more steps toward opening things up,” he said. “The number I watch most closely is the number of people that have tested positive for the virus and how that number has been under 20 percent through almost the entire pandemic.”

In the end, Dodge said all indications are the virus is going to fall well short of reaching the worse levels many feared it would when it first started to sweep across the country. As of June 26, Illinois reported 140,291 confirmed cases of the coronavirus, including 6,847 deaths.

“It’s not going to be as contagious or as deadly as the earliest models suggested,” he said. I think as the data is clearly trending in that direction, the governor needs to be more flexible and we all need to be working together to make sure we make our state as safe as it can be from the virus.”