Another 25 people have died of COVID-19 in Illinois, as health officials on Tuesday announced an additional 707 people have contracted the virus.
That raised the state’s coronavirus death toll to 7,128 and the overall case tally to 155,506.
And following Illinois’ first three-day stretch since a peak month of May with daily case counts over 1,000, Tuesday marked a return to relatively low numbers — the first day in a week with fewer than 800 cases.
The new cases were confirmed among the latest batch of 28,446 test results reported to the Illinois Department of Public Health, good for a positivity rate of just under 2.5%. More than 2 million tests have been administered over the last four months.
The state’s rolling positivity rate over the last week is 3%, a number that has crept up from just 2% in mid-June. The positivity rate was over 17% at the state’s height of the pandemic in mid-May.
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The recent uptick has drawn the attention of Gov. J.B. Pritzker, but hasn’t made him second-guess last month’s reopening of bars and restaurants, at least for now.
“We’re watching these numbers very, very closely,” Pritzker said at a news conference. “We’ve been very measured about how we’ve reopened our state, and there are many people that complain that where we are now isn’t open enough. … If we see a sustained upward movement of numbers, that’s something that is an alert for all of us in the governor’s office and in our administration to begin to look at the mitigations that we need to put in place,” he said.
The latest deaths included two Cook County men in their 20s, an age group that officials say has accounted for an outsize portion of new cases.
Pritzker said the state is gearing its coronavirus messaging toward those young people, urging them to wear masks, wash hands and maintain social distance.
“I don’t want anybody to catch it, but when you’re a young person, you’re often feeling invincible. You carry the virus, you can shed it to other people and may not ever feel any of the conditions that come with the virus,” Pritzker said.
As of Monday night, 1,416 coronavirus patients were hospitalized, with 333 in intensive care units and 126 on ventilators.
