IGPA COVID-19 Pandemic Task Force

Recent work from the task force includes a Policy Spotlight that mines lessons from the 2008 housing market collapse for solutions to the current housing crisis, a report that re-examines the impact that the COVID-19 pandemic has had on state revenues in Illinois, and a Policy Spotlight about how the pandemic is affecting educators.

Select an image below to read the report, or scroll down to view all of the task force’s previous work.

There is reason to believe that the economic damage from the COVID-19 pandemic may weigh especially heavily on small business. Restaurants, bars, bookstores, day care centers, hair salons, and most other commercial establishments had their economic activities greatly restricted. This third report from the Economic and Fiscal Health Impact Group of the IGPA Task Force on the Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic provides some preliminary evidence about how small businesses in Illinois fared in comparison to their Midwestern neighbors in Iowa, Indiana, Kentucky Michigan, Missouri, and Wisconsin.

Read the report.

This Policy Spotlight analyzes responses from several Pandemic Stress Indicator Expert Panel surveys, referred to in the report as “waves,” conducted over the summer of 2020. Read the report.

This Policy Spotlight looks at some of the pros and cons of voting by mail as well as voters’ perceptions of it across the country. The authors suggest steps Illinois officials can take to help ensure voter confidence in the November election. Read the report.

This Policy Spotlight explores the impact of the COVID-19 in the state’s prisons and jails and on the communities where they are located. It examines cases of correctional facilities across the country that have become hotspots for COVID-19 infections and compares with the situation in Illinois, where the confirmed rate of COVID-19 cases in some correctional settings is significantly higher than the rate in the state’s general population. 

This post was updated July 6, 2020. Read the report.

This Policy Spotlight examines how the pandemic is affecting child care centers and family child care providers, who offer care in their homes. The report notes that access to affordable childcare is crucial to economic recovery, and the lack of access to childcare caused by the pandemic could cause women, in particular, to withdraw from the workforce. It also documents the financial assistance from the state and federal governments that has been available for providers so far and makes some policy suggestions. 

Read the report.

The Economic and Fiscal Health Impact Group's second report delves into the impact that the COVID-19 pandemic has had on the employment picture in Illinois. The report finds that the current recession differs from past ones in key ways. Perhaps the biggest difference is the continued public health threat COVID-19 presents, which might cause Illinois residents to continue to limit their economic activity.  Read the report.

This second in our series of Policy Spotlights focuses on child abuse and neglect. There has been a dramatic decrease in calls to the state's hotline since the governor issued his first stay-at-home order in March. April's call volume was just 47 percent of the volume from April 2019. The spotlight makes several suggestions for ways to improve monitoring of vulnerable children during this pandemic. Read the report.

This report presents a high-level summary of the current and expected impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the healthcare workforce and makes a series of recommendations about how to minimize the adverse impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on healthcare workers and their families in Illinois, now and over time.

Read the report.
 

This first Policy Spotlight focuses on helping Illinois develop a systematic understanding of what the pandemic has meant for people’s lives, so these human costs can also be a part of any decision-making processes, along with public health information and broader economic data. The spotlight, which is the first in an ongoing series, is the result of collaboration between IGPA and the Urban Data Visualization Lab at the University of Illinois at Chicago. It incorporates maps that more clearly identify vulnerabilities in Ilinois, both to the virus and to the socioeconomic impact of the pandemic.

Read the report.

This report, from the Community and Family Resilience Impact Group, examines the strain that COVID-19 pandemic is putting on communities and families in Illinois and has some suggesgtions for how policymakers can help promote community cohesion and family resilience in the face of the crisis.

Read the report.

This first report from the Economic and Fiscal Health Impact Group  is intended to identify fiscal pressure points in a timely enough manner that the information can be useful to policymakers currently working on the state’s budget. The impact group plans a series of reports that suggest potential policy approaches for state and local governments for coping with the pandemic. 

Read the report.