Another 5,742 people have tested positive for the coronavirus in Illinois, state health officials announced Christmas Day, the second lowest daily caseload for the state since late October but still more than double the worst days in the summer.
An additional 156 deaths were also reported Friday — including two Cook County men in their 40s and a DuPage woman in her 100s — bringing the state’s pandemic death toll to 15,799. There have been 930,849 confirmed cases in Illinois so far.
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As daily case totals have started to fall in recent weeks, a subsequent decrease in deaths is beginning to follow. The state’s rolling average daily death rate stands at 112, down from 138 a week ago. A total of 3,521 people have died of the coronavirus in Illinois this month alone, an average of 140 per day. There were about 2,500 deaths in all of November, about 80 per day.
Almost 99,000 coronavirus tests were processed in Illinois labs the past 24 hours for a total of 12.89 million since the start of the pandemic.
As of Christmas Eve, 4,352 people statewide were hospitalized due to complications from COVID-19, with 928 of those patients in the ICU and 538 on ventilators.
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