CHICAGO — Illinois saw 145 more people die from coronavirus during the past day.
Just since Friday, 514 people have died from COVID-19 in Illinois.
The staggering toll adds on to recent heavy losses: Last week was the deadliest of the pandemic for Illinois, with nearly 1,000 coronavirus victims. The weekend saw another 284 deaths, and 90 people were reported dead Monday.
“Illinois is now averaging 152 deaths per day from COVID-19. That’s an average of 35 more individuals per day than the worst rate that we reached back in the spring,” Gov. JB Pritzker said during a Monday news conference. “Each of these individuals … survived for months during this pandemic. Some of them might have gotten tired and let their guard down. Others might have been trying their best to do all the right things and somehow, some way still got infected in this horrible pandemic that’s still ravaging our nation and taking more than 1,000 American lives in the last 24 hours.
“But even without knowing each of their pandemic stories, I can tell you this: Most of their deaths were preventable if everyone wore their masks.”
Among the most recent victims were 33 people in Cook County, including two men in their 30s. At least 13,487 people have died from COVID-19 in Illinois, and another 897 deaths are considered to be probably related to coronavirus.
Elsewhere in Illinois, the virus recently killed a teenager, a person in their 20s and people in their 30s, 40s, 50s and older, showing how COVID-19 “can be a deadly disease at all ages,” said Dr. Ngozi Ezike, head of the Illinois Department of Public Health.
The state also reported 7,910 cases in the past day. That brings the total number of confirmed cases in Illinois up to 804,174.
Pritzker and Ezike urged people to keep taking safety measures as the nation begins to look ahead to a vaccine. Health care workers and people in long-term care facilities could start getting vaccine in just two weeks in Illinois.
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Officials expect there could be another spike in cases — and, later, deaths — due to people gathering for Thanksgiving. It’s too early to tell if that surge is happening in Illinois, Ezike said.
“You’ll see the increase in the cases first,” Ezike said. “That will then be followed by the hospitalizations. … We still need more time. It’s too early to say.”
Because of that, every region in Illinois will remain under Tier 3 restrictions for at least several more weeks, Pritzker has said. The rules close museums, casinos and theaters; cut capacity at stores; stop indoor sports and put stricter rules in place at gyms and salons, among other things.
Chicago is also under a stay at home advisory. People are being asked to stay home as much as possible, leaving only for essential things like grocery shopping; to work from home if possible; to stop gathering with anyone outside their household; and to stop traveling.
The surge in new cases in Chicago — and across Illinois — can only partially be explained by increased testing; in reality, there are more cases because coronavirus is spreading so much, officials have said. There’s evidence of that in the way positivity rates and COVID-19 deaths and hospitalizations rose rapidly and have stayed high.
Illinois’ seven-day positivity fell to 9.9 percent Tuesday with 95,825 tests reported. It was at 10.3 percent Monday. The figure represents total confirmed cases divided by total tests.
Illinois’ seven-day test positivity, which measures how many tests were positive out of total tests, fell slightly to 11.8 percent Tuesday. It was at 11.9 percent Monday.
As of Monday night, 5,199 people were hospitalized with coronavirus in Illinois, including 1,071 people in the ICU and 626 people using ventilators.
In Chicago, 18 deaths and 1,179 confirmed cases were reported since Monday. There have been at least 3,645 deaths from COVID-19 in Chicago and 175,752 confirmed cases, according to state data.
The city is seeing an average of 17 deaths per day, the same as the week prior.
An average of 1,412 confirmed cases are being reported per day, a 19 percent decrease from the prior week. But testing has also fallen 33 percent in the past week.
There was a large drop in testing over the holiday weekend, but city officials expect that to come back up, Dr. Allison Arwady, head of the Chicago Department of Public Health, said during a Thursday livestream.
The city’s seven-day positivity rate is at 13.4 percent, up from 11.4 percent the week before.
Chicago’s made “nice progress” recently, Arwady said, but it still has far too many deaths and new cases of COVID-19.
It is “still not the time for gathering at all,” Arwady said. “Still the time for being careful.”
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