Four regions is too simplistic for reopening

I saw Gov. Pritzker's "Restore Illinois Health Regions" are broken up into four colored zones. The Northeast region unfairly includes the far Northwest and Western suburbs which have a substantially lower COVID-19 incident rate percentage than the city of Chicago. We have seen parties with an attendance of over 150 people in Chicago on the evening news.

The Northeast region of his map has the highest positivity rate of 22.3%, far exceeding the other three regions in the state solely driven by the city of Chicago and several other selected suburbs along the lakefront.

Those of us in the Northwest and Western suburbs should not be included with the Northeast group since most suburbs have incident rates more in line with the North-Central and Central regions. The failure to classify the entire state of Illinois with more enhanced metric groupings unfairly penalizes businesses and residents of the Northeast region.

This will result in delayed openings well beyond the actual COVID case history simply due to the lack of detail to the mapping. Possibly a ZIP code classification would have been a better choice for the governor since it would allow for a more detailed analysis and more accurate decision making process to reopen the state.

In closing, our state cannot be divided into four simple geographic groupings when so much is at stake for all of us.

Tonya Dunsing

Lake Zurich