This story has been updated.
CHICAGO — A young girl is among the most recent local victims of coronavirus.
The girl was a 7-year-old who lived in suburban Stone Park. She died June 3 from leukemia and respiratory failure due to COVID-19, according to the Cook County Medical Examiner’s Office.
New cases of COVID-19, hospitalizations and deaths have plunged in recent weeks as vaccines have become widely available. The state of Illinois and city of Chicago plan to fully reopen Friday due to the drops.
But people do still continue to get sick with and die from COVID-19. Another 14 Illinoisans were reported dead from coronavirus since Sunday, including a child in Cook County, and 69 people were reported dead over the weekend.
Now that vaccines are widely available to people 12 and older, about 98 percent of new cases and deaths are among people who are not fully vaccinated, Dr. Allison Arwady, head of the Chicago Department of Public Health, has previously said.
Last week, Arwady said the city has seen cases among young people, and the best thing people can do to protect children younger than 12 is to “get everybody vaccinated around them.”
“A note of caution: COVID’s still here, still with us,” Mayor Lori Lightfoot said at a news conference Thursday.
During Phase 5, capacity restrictions will be lifted at all businesses and life will return to a new “normal.” All people will still need to wear masks in certain settings, including schools, health care facilities and on public transit, but fully vaccinated people won’t need masks in most settings.
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Unvaccinated people should still wear masks in most public settings, officials have said.
It’s possible there will be another surge of cases in the fall and winter, which could mean restrictions are brought back, Arwady and Lightfoot said Thursday. But for now, the numbers look good, Arwady said.
“When we looked at our data, every one of the indicators that we’re tracking is honestly doing better than we expected it to be doing at this point. They are all in that lower-risk phase,” Arwady said Friday. “This is the time to open, when you’re on a significant decline like this. I can’t predict fully what we’ll see in the fall or the winter.
“… We felt that we shouldn’t wait. We’re ready to go now. … . We can reopen and, please, get folks vaccinated.”
People getting vaccinated is still the best bet for ending the pandemic, reopening businesses and having the world return to normal, officials have said. More people getting vaccinated also means there are fewer chances for variants of COVID-19 to develop and spread, which would endanger people and pose a threat to reopening efforts.
Everyone 12 and older is eligible to get vaccinated in Chicago and throughout Illinois. The vaccinations are free and do not require insurance.
Anyone can call the city’s coronavirus hotline at 312-746-4835 to get more information on how and where to get vaccinated in their community.
In Illinois, about 5.5 million people of all ages — or 43.77 percent of the state’s 12.7 million people — have gotten all their COVID-19 vaccination shots, according to state data.
Across the state, 39,048 vaccine doses are being administered per day, based on a seven-day rolling average. Illinois and Chicago have administered at least 11,664,700 vaccine doses of the 13,900,965 provided to them.
City data shows more than 1.1 million Chicagoans — or 43 percent of all residents — have gotten fully vaccinated. About 52.9 percent of all Chicagoans have gotten at least one shot. Among Chicagoans 65 and older, 71 percent have gotten at least one dose, while 62.2 percent have finished their vaccination.
The most recent coronavirus victims included 11 people from Cook County, including a child.
At least 22,963 people have died from COVID-19 in Illinois, and another 2,409 deaths are probably related to the virus, according to the state.
The state reported 244 cases since Sunday. That brings the total number of confirmed cases in Illinois up to 1,385,489.
Illinois’ seven-day positivity rate fell to 1.1 percent Monday with 27,348 tests reported. It was at 1.2 percent Sunday. The figure represents the percentage of people testing positive among recent tests.
Illinois’ seven-day test positivity rate, which measures the percentage of tests that were positive, held at 1.4 percent Monday.
As of Sunday night, 788 people were hospitalized with coronavirus in Illinois, including 217 people in the ICU and 116 people using ventilators.
In Chicago, six deaths and 56 confirmed cases were reported since Sunday. There have been at least 5,393 deaths from COVID-19 in Chicago and 284,880 confirmed cases, according to state data.
The city is seeing an average of four deaths per day, down from five per day the week prior.
An average of 106 confirmed cases are being reported per day, a 44 percent decrease from the previous week. At the same time, testing has fallen 21 percent since a week ago.
The city’s seven-day positivity rate is at 1.8 percent, down from 2.4 percent the week before.
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