Lake County Gazette

For Illinois residents, Chris Bos laments the fear of the unknown makes the battle against COVID-19 that much more daunting.

“I think one of the biggest challenges now is residents are being asked to comply with restrictions without any measurable metric of how and when we can overcame them,” Bos told the Lake County Gazette. “We’re being asked to go along without completely knowing what data Gov. (J.B.) Pritzker is basing his decisions on. The state of Indiana just released a timeline of when all their restrictions may end, but the people of Illinois, while willing to make sacrifices need to help the community, have no idea what the future looks like or what it will take to open up the economy.”

With frustrations mounting, hundreds of protesters recently took to the streets in downtown Chicago and Springfield, staging protests outside of government buildings where they demanded that the governor put an end to the stay-at-home order he recently extended through the end of May as a way of ideally mitigating the spread of the virus.

“The governor has made this decision all about him and what his feelings are,” said Bos, who is running against incumbent Rep. Mary Edly-Allen (D-Libertyville) in the 51st District. “That’s not how it’s supposed to be. I think there’s a reason we elect state representative and state senators to make sure we have local representation. There is none of that in making these orders.”

In the end, Bos said Pritzker’s one-size-fits-all approach to dealing with the virus has never been the answer.

“We all have different economies, populations and situations that we’re dealing with, and having the governor to declare broad-stroke executive orders is not at all fair to local communities,” he said.