Illinois sees only one new COVID-19 death, but daily caseload again tops 1,000

State health officials on Monday announced 1,319 new coronavirus cases and one additional death.

It’s the 20th straight day of four-digit daily caseloads, but only the second day since late March with just one additional fatality, a woman in her 90s in downstate Cumberland County.

The daily case count has mostly fluctuated between 1,000 and 2,000 in the last four weeks — an uptick from a string of days in June and early July when daily case counts were mostly in the hundreds.

The daily count rose over 2,000 in Illinois for two consecutive days on Friday and Saturday.

But the last time Illinois recorded only a single additional COVID-19 death was on July 26,

The disparity between new infections and deaths has been a trend in the coronavirus summer surge.

For the first ten days of August, the state saw 16,562 new cases for a daily average of 1,656. That’s more than double the daily average of 764 in June and up sharply from July’s daily average of 1,150. But the state is averaging fewer than 15 deaths a day so far this month. Despite June’s much lower daily case count, in that month, the state was averaging 51 deaths per day.

But despite the disparity, public health officials have been girding for the death count to rise.

Monday’s numbers bring the state’s total tally of cases to 195,399, and the number of deaths to 7,637.

The preliminary seven-day statewide positivity rate has steadily climbed in recent weeks and currently stands at 4.1%

A week ago it was 4% and the week before that it was 3.7%

Within the past 24 hours, laboratories have reported 32,353 specimens for a total of 3,106,341.

Ashlee Rezin Garcia/Sun-Times file

Pritzker has said he would not hesitate to reimpose restrictions in regions of the state where the virus is rapidly spreading.

If a region surpasses certain thresholds — metrics include percentage of people testing positive, hospital capacity, and rising hospital admissions — then officials can choose to tighten restrictions from a “menu” of options outlined in the new tiered-system.