Illinois’ COVID-19 death toll pushes past 9,000 as state struggles to contain virus
State public health officials on Tuesday reported 2,851 newly diagnosed cases and 29 additional deaths of people with COVID-19, raising the death toll to 9,026 throughout the course of the pandemic. There now have been 324,743 known cases of the coronavirus in Illinois.
The state on Tuesday reported the seven-day rolling test positivity rate was 4.5% for the period ending Monday, up from 3.4% a week earlier.
“More than 9,000 Illinoisans — our mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters, family, friends, and neighbors — have had their lives cut short by COVID-19, leaving tens of thousands more to grieve loved ones lost too soon,” Gov. J.B. Pritzker said in a statement issued Tuesday.
Pritzker and Illinois Department of Public Health Director Dr. Ngozi Ezike both again urged Illinois residents to wear masks and keep a physical distance from others in an effort to curb the spread of coronavirus.
“After 9 months of battling this virus and hearing the updates each day, many of us forget that the hospitalizations and deaths are more than just numbers,” Ezike said in a statement Tuesday.
The state has been on nothing short of a roller coaster since COVID-19 first gripped it in March, with numbers of cases and deaths spiking in the spring, prompting broad and strict statewide regulations meant to stem the spread and fears hospitals would be overwhelmed with patients.
The statewide numbers began stabilizing and then declining, as Pritzker’s administration issued a regional, phased-in reopening plan. But weeks after the state entered phase four in late June, the state’s case numbers began creeping back up. Over the past several months, the state has ramped up its testing capacity significantly from where it was in the spring, but the 11 regions as defined under the state’s reopening plan have charted different paths with their test positivity rates.
Three regions have surpassed a state-defined threshold of 8% for three consecutive days, triggering a scaled-back reopening that saw bars and indoor dining ordered shuttered, and gathering size caps halved to 25 people from the 50 allowed in phase four of Pritzker’s plan.
The northwest region that includes Rockford, DeKalb and Galena remains under a rolled-back reopening after surpassing the state’s 8% positivity rate threshold, while a far southern Illinois region is on the verge of seeing its reopening rolled back.
The 20-county region at Illinois’ southern tip that includes Carbondale reached an 8% positivity rate Saturday, the most recently available state data shows. If the state reports positivity rates at or above that level on Wednesday and Thursday, a rolled-back reopening would follow, under the terms of Pritzker’s reopening plan.
Chicago, which is its own region under Pritzker’s reopening plan, had a 4.7% positivity rate as of Saturday.
Suburban Cook County’s rate was slightly higher, 5.6%, while DuPage and Kane counties were at 6.4% test positivity, and Lake and McHenry were at 6.2%.
The more than 2,800 newly diagnosed coronavirus cases the state reported Tuesday came out of a batch of 55,993 tests conducted during the prior 24 hours.
As of Monday night, 1,848 people in Illinois were hospitalized with COVID-19, with 406 of those patients in intensive care units and 160 on ventilators.
