For the Record: My Unpublished, Solicited Chicago Tribune Op-Ed [Updated on 19 June 2025 to include "in print" statements and social media posts about school closures]
Unpublished editorial, Chicago Tribune article on school openings, selected tweets, and link to The Children’s Inquiry: How the state and society failed the young during the Covid-19 pandemic (UK)
The following is an op-ed that I wrote at the invitation of the Chicago Tribune in August 2020 that was never published. Long story short: They wanted me to introduce myself, “dumb it down,” and make it more “relatable.” I appreciated the feedback, but didn’t want to turn what I’d written into a personal essay—or compromise the content.
I changed a few words for clarity, but this submission is otherwise the same as what I sent to the Editor. Reading it in Spring 2022 [Edit: and again in June 2025] makes me sad, but also makes me smile.
I’m posting it now as a record of what I thought and felt at the time.
I stand by every word.1
August 27, 2020
Illinois is still in a state of emergency, experiencing an unprecedented public health disaster. At least that’s what our state and local officials keep telling us.
Suddenly, “30 days to slow the spread” has turned into five months and counting, with no end in sight, short of a vaccine. As a concerned taxpayer who has closely examined national, state, and county data, I’m compelled to shed light on what we need to know from our state and local leadership about COVID19 in Illinois.
First, we need to know how Illinois is defining and counting COVID19 deaths. In April [2020], Ngozi Ezike, Director of IDPH, said anyone who tested positive for COVID19, regardless of cause of death, is counted as a COVID death.
Last week, the St. Clair County Health Department added nine deaths to its count after IDPH told them to count as COVID the death of anyone who dies within 30 days of testing COVID-positive. If that’s the guideline, it helps explain not only over 4,200 long-term care facility deaths in Illinois, but also 45 deaths involving falls, motor vehicle accidents, drug overdoses, poisoning, and self-harm in the Cook County Examiner’s COVID database.
The criteria or rationale for defining a COVID death should be articulated and defended to the public, especially because the Governor has used these deaths to justify policies that have had serious health and economic consequences for millions.
It’s also critical to see when the COVID-attributed deaths actually occurred. IDPH data is based on day of report, not day of actual death. The 9 deaths added to the St. Clair County total occurred in July. In Cook County, the May 23rd suicide of a 20-year-old COVID-positive woman was added to the Cook COVID deaths register last week, as was the April 2nd death of a 70-year-old man earlier this month. These can’t be dismissed as outliers or errors.
Using data obtained from the department via FOIA, I compared the state’s COVID deaths by day of death and by day of report through August 4. IDPH’s public graph shows a reported daily high of 191 deaths, while its day of death data shows 128 for a one-day high. Besides sharper, more visually alarming peaks, IDPH’s day-of-report graph has a higher 7-day moving average. This suggests either more deaths are being reported than have ended up being attributed to COVID, or old deaths are being reported with recent deaths.
There’s also the mismatch between CDC and IDPH death counts for the state. Currently, the CDC has certified 479 fewer COVID deaths in Illinois from March thru June than IDPH says there were. The difference isn’t explained by reporting lag. The number of probable deaths, which IDPH reports separately, oscillates from week to week, without explanation of the relationship to the overall death count. Are these probables being reviewed then announced as new deaths? Do these help explain some of the differences? We need to know.
What about hospitalizations? A primary reason we upended our lives in March was to ensure hospitals were not overwhelmed. They weren’t then, and they aren’t now. Every measure from Emergency Room visits for COVID-Like Illness (CLI) to ventilator use and ICU bed occupancy is down. IDPH and Chicago report some of these data in terms of COVID Patients, but what does that mean? Are Illinois’ “COVID Patients” folks who are in the hospital for other reasons, like pregnancy, who then test positive for COVID? Is it patients who visit the ER due to COVID symptoms, and then test positive and are hospitalized to be treated for the disease? We deserve to know.
Then there’s testing. From the Governor to universities, we are engaged in a “seek and ye shall find” testing strategy they are convinced is key to returning to normal. Test-without-ceasing is the handmaiden of the “percent positive” goalpost that’s being used to warn, shame, and exact mitigations on counties and industries where mask-lessness and social gatherings - but not protests - are the alleged culprits.
Yet we don’t know the contexts for testing, when all reported tests occurred, or the validity estimates for the tests being used. This week, the CDC recommended people not be tested for COVID, unless they have symptoms or a known exposure. Is the state aware of this recommendation? Will it adjust for “the science”?
The sidekick of testing is the state’s multi-million contact tracing effort. Despite the size of investment, little data from the effort has been shared.
And what is a “case”? Chicago’s dashboard says cases are “people who receive a positive test result.” Pre-COVID, “case” has always meant a person who is sick, rather than simply carrying a live virus or remnants thereof. The term has lost meaning in this epidemic because many people who test positive are asymptomatic and never become ill. “I have an asymptomatic ‘case’ of the flu,” said no one ever. Among individuals testing, how many are asymptomatic?
We don’t know.
Sadly, we do know that no population has suffered more than Illinois’ long-term care facility residents. Those deaths make up 55% of Illinois’ reported total. This month, 75% of reported COVID deaths are in those facilities.
With IDPH launching an internal investigation into employees’ alleged mishandling of abuse complaints, we need answers to other basic questions about these deaths. How many facility residents had DNRs? How does this year’s Illinois LTCF death rate compare to other years? Some studies estimate nursing home facility turnover at 25% - 35% per year. The CDC says as many as 380,000 LTCFs die annually from infections contracted in facilities. Until this spring, LTCFs in Cook County were not required to report deaths to the medical examiner. If these data exist, they should be released for analysis.
The bottom line is this: State and local leaders want us to believe Illinois is still in the midst of a public health emergency that warrants closed schools, crushed business, and curbed liberties.
It’s time citizens demand they prove it.
19 June 2025 - further context/reflection (prompted by reader comment)
I fully recognize that a number of my assumptions and conclusions as of late August 2020 were incorrect and well within the bounds of what I now view as ‘permitted dissent’.
Under the circumstances, it was striking for the Chicago Tribune to even invite me to write something. I credit one of the editors (female) who had been following me on Twitter. Historically, the Tribune is the more conservative-leaning publication of the two major Chicago papers (Sun-Times being the other).
I also know that what I wrote was not newspaper-friendly, regardless of topic. A critic might say I should have revised, reduced, and re-stylized in order to get a message out there in mass media, and that I was being too proud in refusing to go back and forth with revisions. I wasn't on Substack until mid-2021, and didn't have an alt-outlet to publish something longer, after all, so why was I looking a gift horse in the mouth?
One reason may have been stress around the reopening of schools. I had decided to homeschool both of my kids and chosen to give up professional/career endeavors to do so. I recall being ticked off and feeling like the Tribune wanted me to present myself and my concerns differently than I want to present myself and my concerns. Plus, neither the Tribune nor any news outlets were asking tough questions about the data and statements from Illinois DPH, and I perceived (rightly or wrongly) that the editors didn’t want any “competition”.
A few weeks earlier, I was one of the parents interviewed by the Tribune for a 4 August 2020 story about re-opening schools.
Excerpt:
But many local parents who also want schools reopened say the issue is one of personal choice, not politics, despite the debate erupting just months before the 2020 presidential election.
“It’s kind of funny, because when people hear that I want my kids back in the classroom this fall, some will be like, ‘Are you a Trump supporter?’ which I’m not, but what does that have to do with it?” said Evanston resident Jessica Hockett, whose children are 9 and 13.
After learning that Evanston-Skokie School District 65 is expected to begin the new school year with remote learning, Hockett said she has decided to withdraw her two children and home-school them instead.
“I had hoped they’d get the kids back in school at the start of the school year, even if it was some kind of hybrid choice,” said Hockett, adding that she does support a remote learning option “for teachers and parents who are fearful about going back in person.”
Karen Ann Cullotta, the reporter, was aware of me because of my Twitter account. From what I remember, Ms. Cullotta was among the few Chicago-area print journalists who was giving a voice to parents who were advocating for open schools.
The reason I was in support of a remote learning option for families who wanted it isn’t because I thought remote learning was good for any child (or teacher). As an education professional, I already knew it wasn’t and was downright disgusted with the cowardice and abandonment of common sense I witnessed on the part of schools boards and administrators. But my expertise in gifted education and work in 100+ school districts and many private schools across the U.S. had made me a supporter of parents having a range flexible options and being able to make the choices they felt were best for their children.
Plus, as Chicago-area parents remember well, the fiercest fighting against school openings in summer 2020 (and long afterward) came from teacher unions — as I had predicted in the spring would be the case. So any kind of opening was seen by many as “better” than nothing at all and (in my view then) a reasonable accommodation for teachers who were truly afraid due to lies that media and public officials were telling.2
Besides the @Wood_House76 account and this Substack, other statements I made about U.S. school closures are documented in The Children’s Inquiry: How the state and society failed the young during the Covid-19 pandemic by Liz Cole and Molly Kingsley. I’m grateful to Liz for speaking to me and a fellow Evanston parent in 2020 about what was happening in the UK with schools and masking children, as compared to the U.S.
That fellow parent and I, together with a few others, were inspired by Liz (co-founder of UsForThem) to start a Twitter account - @KidNCrisis2020 - dedicated to "giving voice to concerns about the effects of the COVID19 response on kids of all ages.”3
Other advocacy competed with maintaining that account, but it‘s still accessible with tweets that document some of the horrifying things that occurred — and which many are trying to forget or deny.
All Chicago-related posts: https://www.woodhouse76.com/s/chicago
Footnote added 18 June 2020: …as a reflection of the “best” of what I or anyone who was looking and paying attention could have/should have seen at the time. The burden is higher, of course, for those in positions of power and who possessed relevant knowledge/expertise coming into 2020.
Footnote added 19 June 2020: As I pointed out on Twitter numerous times, the average age of a U.S. teacher is 41. So, even by “official narrative” standards, the fear never made sense. The 'teachers with co-morbidities’ excuse was likewise contrived as a basis for closures. Anyone who reads the school-related components of the CARES Act, signed 27 March 2020, can see that long-term closures were planned for and well-funded.
Footnote added 19 June 2020: Staged picture using my then 13-year-old son as profile.
AS I am going through this, I can already hear what those in the narrative would say in response. "It's not just about death," and. the other one, "why all this focus on death alone?"
Most of what those of us who are not indoctrinated do is dissent against the narrative. And initially we were treated to the hyperbole of the Ferguson model. 3% dead was what they stated, and then other hyperbole like "it will be as bad as the Spanish Flu" (now we know that even the Spanish flu wasn't as bad as the Spanish Flu.)
They are the ones that created the narrative, we didn't want to wake up, counting deaths, asking about death certificates, tracing down the origins of the death, and realizing that death records were far from as cut and dry as the medical professionals claim that they are. We did this because they were the ones who created policies predicated on these assertions. "Facts" as they call them, that aren't factual at all.
I wished we lived in a world where we, humans, didn't have to do the labelling, but we are, and thus the data of "cause of death" is only as good as those who determine it. Back in 2003, It took six months to diagnose my mother with what would eventually kill her in July of that same year.That's just for figuring out what was wrong with a living person. And yet we live in this almost parochial world where we can determine death from a positive PCR test?
Jessica Hockett’s unpublished op-ed isn’t just a time capsule—it’s a scalpel, slicing through the bureaucratic fog and data games that defined the COVID-19 response in Illinois. What’s striking isn’t just how meticulously she sourced the anomalies—the suicide retroactively counted as a COVID death, the May fatality logged in August—but how calmly and clearly she assembled a case for skepticism. No wild theorizing, no performative outrage—just facts that speak loudly enough to make officials squirm.
Her refusal to "dumb it down" or make it about herself shows integrity, especially in a media landscape where personal anecdotes are often used to mask a lack of rigor. The piece reads like a quiet indictment—not just of how the data were manipulated, but of a media class too timid (or too captured) to publish anything that didn’t flatter the state’s narrative.
She was right to stand by every word. The only scandal bigger than what she uncovered is that the Tribune sat on it.