IGPA COVID-19 Pandemic Task Force

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. 

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.

This Policy Spotlight examines how the pandemic is affecting child care centers and family child care providers, who offer care in their homes. 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.

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.

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.

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.
 

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.

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.

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.