181 more Illinois coronavirus deaths, but state ‘headed in right direction’

Most of the state’s key COVID-19 metrics kept trending in the right direction, though, with the average statewide positivity rate dipping to 8.4%.

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Nurse Jessica Bell administers sedative medication for a man with COVID-19 last week in the intensive care unit at Roseland Community Hospital on the Far South Side.

Nurse Jessica Bell administers sedative medication for a man with COVID-19 last week in the intensive care unit at Roseland Community Hospital on the Far South Side.

Ashlee Rezin Garcia/Sun-Times file

Public health officials on Thursday announced the coronavirus has killed another 181 residents and spread to 8,828 more, the highest daily figures reported by the state in a week. 

Most of the state’s key COVID-19 metrics still kept trending in the right direction, though, with the new cases confirmed among 92,015 tests to lower the average statewide positivity rate to 8.4%. 

That number, which experts use to gauge how rapidly the virus is spreading, has slowly declined from 13.2% on Nov. 13, when the state hit a peak in its record-setting autumn resurgence. 

Hospital admissions have gradually fallen from all-time highs in late November, too. As of Wednesday night, 4,751 hospital beds across the state were occupied by COVID-19 patients, with 1,056 receiving intensive care and 575 using ventilators. On the busiest night of the pandemic for hospitals, COVID-19 patients were taking up 6,175 beds Nov. 20. 

“I am guarded that we are headed in the right direction in terms of the numbers trending slightly downward,” Illinois Public Health Director Dr. Ngozi Ezike said. “But that’s not an indication that we should throw caution to the wind and make large holiday and New Year’s Eve plans.”

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Three of the state’s 11 regions are already meeting the criteria initially set by Gov. J.B. Pritzker last month to shed the Tier 3 mitigations — like bans on indoor dining at bars and restaurants. But in anticipation of a potential surge due to holiday gatherings, the Democratic governor said he won’t be lifting any restrictions until at least a few weeks into the new year. 

“There’s no date set here, but suffice to say that I want as much as anybody else to open up as many things as we possibly can, safely,” Pritzker said. 

Hospitals are still stretched thin in the downstate Metro East region, where only 14 ICU beds were available as of Wednesday night, and in the southern Illinois region, where 17 beds were open. 

And the state’s death rate has shown no signs of slowing down. The virus has claimed nearly 4,000 lives over the last month alone, making for a brutal average of 133 deaths per day. During the worst 30-day stretch of the first wave of the pandemic in the spring, about 100 deaths were reported each day. 

The latest victims included 94 Chicago-area residents, including a Cook County man in his 20s. The state has reported triple-digit death counts for 10 straight days, and the disturbing numbers aren’t expected to go down anytime soon. 

“When you’re still talking about 8,000-plus cases in a day, that means ... quite a number of people will still pass away as a percentage of that,” Pritzker said.

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Officials have said the state has reached “the beginning of the end” of the pandemic thanks to the arrival of the Pfizer coronavirus vaccine — though the state will receive about half the doses it originally was promised next week by the federal government. 

“They haven’t given us any explanation of why those numbers are smaller than they were before,” Pritzker said. 

About 3,500 health care workers had been vaccinated by Thursday morning, and the rest of the state’s first allotment of 109,000 doses are expected to be administered by the end of the weekend, Pritzker said. 

About 655,000 health care workers are first in line for the vaccine statewide, meaning it’ll be months before shots are available to the general public. 

Since March, a total of 879,428 people have tested positive for COVID-19 in Illinois and 14,835 of them have died. The recovery rate is 97%. 

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