Yesterday, I was coming back home after a long school board meeting in the suburbs. Since it's one of those suburbs where the Pace bus schedule peters out to almost nothing after 7:00 PM, I ended up taking the Metra train to downtown Chicago and went to catch the Brown Line 'L' train up to Rogers Park ( Read more... )

Today, Chicago and the state of Illinois lifted most remaining COVID-19 mitigation-related masking and social distancing requirements and capacity limits. It isn’t quite the end of an era, but it is a step forward.

But when I wrote a decent chunk of this post (on June 7), many of those limits were still in place, and Chicagoland region was caught in ( Read more... )

Even though I got COVID-19 immunity the hard way, I still wanted to get vaccinated ( Read more... )

Loretto Hospital has been part of the Austin community area since 1923. Even as the population of Austin and the surrounding neighborhoods/suburbs, it continued to act as a "safety met" hospital, with the lion's share of the patients having no insurance or some kind of Medicare/Medicaid coverage. Suffice to say, a large number of patients are ( Read more... )

For the most part, Illinois is till currently in Phase 1B of the vaccination program. In order to get inoculated, you have to be 65 or older, or (with a few exceptions) an essential worker, or a teacher, or (in most parts of the state) be an adult with some kind of a long-term health issue. This means that most adults and none of the kids still can ( Read more... )

Ever since the early days of the pandemic, I saw getting COVID-19... maybe not as an inevitability, but the odds were not in my favor. As I have written before, there is only so much journalism one could do from behind the computer. I've covered closely packed (but mostly masked, even if not always properly) rallies and protests. I covered protests ( Read more... )

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On December 15, five medical professionals became the first five Chicagoans to get the COVID-19 vaccine.

The vaccines were administered in Loretto Hospital, which is located in the majority-black part of the Austin community area and primarily serves black and Hispanic West Siders. With COVID-19 hitting those communities especially hard, and ( Read more... )

Pending some miracle, "normal" Thanksgiving was never going to be in the cards this year.

Back in late October, when cases in Wisconsin (where annanov and her immediate family lives) were climbing fast, and cases in Illinois were rising, but slower, I met up with my mom for lunch, and she laid out her Thanksgiving plans. Anna, John and her daughters ( Read more... )

When I was in Michigan City on July 3, I picked up a copy of the Michigan City News-Dispatch (RIP). And the headline on the top of the page had some startling news - five out of seven drivers tested positive for COVID-19, which forced it to cut back hours ( Read more... )