After officials in Chicago announced that they would be adding Wisconsin to the city’s ongoing travel order, Mayor Lori Lightfoot said that no one has been fined for violating the quarantine order since it was implemented earlier this summer.
Under provisions of the order, anyone traveling from one of the states identified by city officials as a coronavirus hotspot must self-quarantine for 14 days after their arrival in Chicago. While it’s technically possible for violators of that order to be fined, Lightfoot says no citations have yet been issued.
“We have not seen any fines yet,” she said during a media availability on Monday.
On Monday, Lightfoot announced that Wisconsin will be added to the travel order later this week. Currently, 18 states are on the list of places from which travelers must self-quarantine when they arrive in Chicago. Alabama, Arkansas, Arizona, California, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, Nevada, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Utah are all on the list as of this week.
Despite an increase in cases in recent weeks, Indiana is not yet on the list, Lightfoot said.
States are added to the list if they have a “case rate greater than 15 new COVID-19 cases per 100,000 resident population, per day, over a 7-day rolling average,” according to the Chicago Department of Public Health.
Lightfoot says that the CPDH would prefer to use increased awareness to help enforce the travel order, rather than issuing fines or other punitive measures.
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“What we’re trying to do is raise people’s consciousness to really try to educate themselves into compliance,” she said. “Our hope is that people understand it. This has really got to be about not just fining people into compliance, but about educating people to understand the risk factors that are out there and the risk that they are taking for their own health and for the health of every single other person that they come into contact with.”
Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker has said that he is not looking to impose a similar order on the statewide level for bordering states like Wisconsin, Indiana and Iowa.
“We don’t live in a country where you close the borders between states,” he said. ‘We’re not going to stop people who live in Illinois and work in Wisconsin from doing so.”
