Tens of thousands of people are expected to pack the United Center and surrounding streets during the Democratic National Convention next month.
Three of the busiest hospitals in the city are about a 20-minute walk from the arena on the Near West Side — Rush University Medical Center, Cook County’s John H. Stroger Jr. Hospital and UI Health. They have spent months preparing for the what ifs, from an explosion or a chemical attack to a mass shooting or dozens of people getting pepper-sprayed.
“We have built a plan to anticipate tens, hundreds, thousands of people coming across the 290 Expressway on the bridges in an event of a mass casualty or a major catastrophe,” said Dr. Nicholas Cozzi, the EMS and disaster medicine medical director at Rush, which has an ER built for a disaster.
These hospitals are also making sure their doors are open to all patients during the convention, like women in labor, people scheduled for surgery or those who get in a car crash.
The medical centers employ thousands of people and need to make sure they can get to work.
Here are five takeaways on what to expect. The convention is Aug. 19-22.
Preparing for a disaster
Cozzi went through a dangerous hypothetical scenario in a recent interview with WBEZ at Rush’s ambulance bay: imagine an explosion or chemical attack hurting up to 100 people. Their eyes are burning. They’re salivating at the mouth. They can’t breathe. And they’re all coming across the bridges that span the 290 expressway just outside Rush.
“It’s not something that you can walk outside and build a tent for and say, ‘Wait please. Let me get to you, and let’s build this,’” Cozzi said. “We have to have it ready to go. And this is turnkey.”
The ambulance bay is designed to quickly decontaminate hundreds of people. Cozzi heads to the eyewash station and turns on what looks like a giant faucet shooting water up to rinse someone’s eyes.
Then a person would head over to one of several areas separated by heavy curtains, giving them privacy to take off their clothes and get sprayed with warm water and soap to remove anything they were exposed to. Next they head to a warming area, change into fresh scrubs and head into the ER.
Rush has also practiced setting up a triage area if there’s a mass casualty event. In general, Cozzi said typically eight out of 10 patients in major disasters don’t come by ambulance. They get dropped off. So hospitals have to prepare for people just showing up.
Hospitals will have incident command centers set up with people keeping an eye on staffing and finances, but also for other situations, such as dozens of migrants who are bused to Chicago and need medical care.
What patients should know
Traffic is likely to be heavy leading up to and during the week of the DNC. The message to patients: be flexible.
Rush is asking people to shift to telehealth visits or see their doctors at another clinic away from downtown. Rush has other hospitals and clinics in the suburbs where doctors will meet their patients, said Shonda Morrow, Rush’s interim chief operating officer who along with Cozzi is leading preparation at the hospital for the convention.
There will be few appointments scheduled after 3 p.m., when more motorcades might be heading to the United Center clogging up traffic.
These shifts allow hospitals in the Illinois Medical District near the United Center to make sure they have enough bandwidth in case a catastrophe happens at the convention or elsewhere in Chicago.
Morrow encourages everyone to sign up for the City of Chicago’s Office of Emergency Management and Communications app to get updates on traffic and street closures during the convention.
Getting hospital employees to work
Rush and Stroger are considering setting up cots in on-call rooms and conference rooms, and UI Health could use student dorms on campus for staff. The idea is to make sure employees have a place to stay, such as anesthesiologists who need to be on call. It’s not just about getting to work, but about having enough providers in case of an emergency.
Hospitals are updating phone trees and seeing who lives nearby and could walk to work compared to those who drive in. They are also seeing who could work from home, such as those in corporate jobs not at the bedside with patients.
There is a delicate balancing act in staffing up too much during the convention: it’s expensive to pay nurses, doctors and others who end up not being needed, Morrow said, especially if some patients end up rescheduling or canceling appointments to avoid traffic.
The silver lining of previous experience
Hospitals across the city are used to being on alert during big events, like the Lollapalooza music festival in Grant Park and the NASCAR street race downtown.
Stroger, for example, is one of the busiest trauma centers in the region and the summer is an especially fraught time for shootings.
“We have a lot of real-time trials that we go through on a daily basis,” said Craig Williams, chief administrative officer at Cook County Health, one of the biggest public health systems in the U.S. On a recent weekend “we had a number of gunshot victims that all came in at the same time.”
With the DNC coming to town though, it’s not just area hospitals coordinating with local police and city emergency management officials, but also with the Secret Service. And that means more information flowing in to help hospitals prepare.
“I think even over the years we’ve learned a lot in terms of coordination,” said Dr. Janet Lin, an emergency department physician at UI Health who co-chairs the hospital’s emergency management committee.
That includes making sure one hospital isn’t overwhelmed with patients.
Doctors here say they already have touched base with hospitals and emergency management officials in Milwaukee, which is hosting the Republican National Convention this week, and will pay close attention to how they handle anything that comes up.
Dealing with uncertainty
Despite all the prep, Williams said what makes him nervous is the unpredictable things that come with holding a massive rally stretched over multiple days in this political moment.
“The only thing that I’m concerned about is just the general political climate,” Williams said. “A sitting president going to his national convention doesn’t seem like it’d be that much of an event.”
There could be big protests just a few months out from the presidential election, on everything from whether Biden is actually the Democrats’ nominee to the war in Gaza, to gun violence and abortion rights. And that increases the risk someone could get hurt.
“We say prepare for the worst and hope for the best,” Williams said.
Kristen Schorsch covers public health and Cook County for WBEZ.
