When we finally get through the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic—the blessed day can't come soon enough—the folks who run our state and local governments will have about five minutes to catch their collective breath. Then they're going to have to turn to another excruciating crisis. And it will be a doozy.

Gov. J.B. Pritzker the other day finally admitted what other officials in his government and at City Hall have been dancing around for weeks. "There is no doubt this (virus) is going to have a significant economic impact on Illinois," he said. "We are trying to mitigate that damage."

"That damage" will be big to huge. With the economy in free-fall—60,000 people applied for unemployment in Illinois in just three days this week, even as virtually every big hotel in town shut for the duration—the already stretched state and city treasuries are going to have to do some very fast bailing.

"The city and state do not have ample operating reserves and are not in good position to weather this," says Mike Belsky, a former mayor and financial analyst who now is executive director of the Center for Municipal Finance at the University of Chicago's Harris School of Public Policy. He suggests deferring all but the most urgent capital expenditures for the time being and shifting money that would have gone to such purposes into government operating accounts.

"We don't really yet know how big the loss of revenues will be, but we know it's significant," says Civic Federation President Laurence Msall, pointing to "enormous" damage in Chicago's huge hospitality sector alone. "Neither the city nor state has a rainy day fund. The city has fast-rising pension liabilities. The state has $6 billion in bills, no reserves, and the worst credit rating of any state in the country."

Details, details.

Insiders say some COVID-19 fiscal damage-control efforts finally seem to be revving up behind the scenes. But no one yet is willing to talk about it.

For instance, at City Hall, the official word is that everything financial is OK, with Mayor Lori Lightfoot declaring "only" 25 percent of the city's base revenues come from economically sensitive sources. Beyond that, the city banked $100 million from a recent debt refinancing that will pay some bills, she said.

But the city's 2020 budget overview book reports that the combination of taxes on sales, income, real estate and other transactions, hotel rooms, parking and recreation alone—every one of them economically sensitive—amounts to nearly 40 percent of projected revenues for the city's corporate (operating) fund. And the budget will have a $160 million hole unless Donald Trump's federal government finally signs off on a Medicaid reimbursement for the use of Fire Department ambulances, something Lightfoot first pitched nearly six months ago and is counting on to balance the books.

At the state, Pritzker proposed two budgets even before COVID-19 hit, one that would cut spending and one that would give things like schools a big hike—but only if, in the midst of an economic crisis, voters in November approve a big tax hike in the form of Pritzker's graduated income tax amendment. Even with that, the state continues to underfund pensions by billions of dollars a year.

The state will get an estimated $790 million boost in the form of higher Medicaid reimbursement rates recently passed by Congress to help with the virus emergency, according to the Civic Federation. But most of that will be eaten up by the additional costs of caring for the infected, and the boost in rates is half that right after the subprime mortgage crash, Msall says.

Fitch Ratings, in a new report, reached much the same conclusion. "A sustained period of disrupted economic activity would test all states' resilience and pressure ratings," it said. "Lower-rated states, such as Illinois, are more vulnerable."

We'll worry about that later, folks. Stay healthy. But worry about it we will.