CHICAGO — Seventy-nine more people were reported to have died from coronavirus in the past day, the state announced Tuesday.
Officials are warning Chicago and the rest of the state are in a dangerous and quickly worsening second wave of COVID-19.
“It is not good here in Chicago,” Dr. Allison Arwady, head of the Chicago Department of Public Health, said during a Tuesday morning livestream.
Similarly, Gov. JB Pritzker warned Monday, “The virus is winning the war right now.”
The city, state and country are breaking new case records almost daily, Arwady said. Chicago’s positivity rate has skyrocketed to 13 percent; just a month ago, it was at 5 percent. And the city has seen a 400 percent increase in daily new cases just since a month ago, she said.
“We’ve had days with more than 2,200 cases on a single day,” and this weekend saw a day with more than 3,000 cases reported for Chicago, Arwady said. “We cannot keep up with that volume of cases, period. … This is an outbreak that is in poor control in every part of the city.”
Up to 145,000 people currently have active COVID-19 right now, Arwady said.
And after a summer where most days only saw two or three people die from coronavirus, the city’s now at an average of seven deaths per day, Arwady said. That number has been quickly rising.
“Now really is the time … to be getting serious, even moreso, about COVID,” Arwady said.
Twenty of the state’s most recent victims were from Cook County, including a woman in her 40s. At least 10,289 people have died from COVID-19 in Illinois, and another 356 deaths are considered to be probably related to coronavirus.
The state also reported 12,623 new cases, bringing the total in Illinois up to 511,183. That’s the 11th time in the past 26 days Illinois has broken a record for new cases in a single day.
Illinois’ seven-day positivity rate rose to 12 percent with 101,955 tests reported. It was at 11.4 percent Monday. The figure represents total confirmed cases divided by total tests.
Illinois’ seven-day positivity, which measures how many tests were positive out of total tests, hit 13.1 percent. It was at 12.4 percent Monday.
As of Sunday night, 4,742 people were hospitalized with coronavirus in Illinois, including 911 people in the ICU and 399 people using ventilators.
In Chicago, 15 deaths and 2,080 confirmed cases were reported since Tuesday. There have been at least 3,153 deaths from COVID-19 in Chicago and 122,040 confirmed cases, according to state data.
An average of 1,686 confirmed cases are being reported per day, a 39 percent increase from the prior week. The city’s seven-day positivity rate has risen to 13 percent, up from 10 percent the week before — and also up from the 12.4 percent it was Monday.
The city is also seeing an average of seven deaths per day; for months, that number hadn’t risen above two or three per day, but it’s been going up the past several weeks.
“I consider myself like I have COVID all the time, and that’s what we need folks to do,” Arwady said.
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