New one-day record cracks 500K cases total
Pritzker warns of rising COVID hospitalizations, lauds 100K tests conducted in a day
Gov. Pritzker says, “We need to gird ourselves for winter,” with “potentially months of the fight ahead of us” in the COVID-19 pandemic. (Illinois.gov)
By Ted Cox
A new one-day record in COVID-19 cases set Tuesday pushed the state past the 500,000 mark in total infections.
The Illinois Department of Public Health reported 12,623 newly confirmed cases of the coronavirus Tuesday, a one-day high, which pushed the statewide total to 511,183. Seventy-nine new deaths attributed to COVID-19 brought the statewide toll to 10,289.
“We all want this to be over, but we need to gird ourselves for winter,” Gov. Pritzker said at the daily coronavirus briefing at the Thompson Center in Chicago. “We have potentially months of the fight ahead of us.”
While the state also cracked 100,000 tests conducted in a day for the first time, pushing the Illinois total past 8.5 million, the seven-day positivity rate climbed to 12 percent. Pritzker said the positivity rate in Iowa is 48 percent, and Wisconsin “is not very far behind that,” but he added that Illinois’s rate was nonetheless “terrible,” and the “positivity rate is going in the wrong direction.”
With the state and nation “on the cusp of going exponential” in the increasing number of infections, Pritzker turned his attention to hospitalizations across the state, which have risen back up over 4,000 for the first time since the spring. The rest of the state outside the Chicago area in northeast Illinois was experiencing “the worst surge that they’ve seen yet” of COVID patients in the hospital, according to Pritzker, and the only reason Chicago and the collar counties weren’t reporting the same was the high number of hospitalizations they saw last spring when the pandemic first hit.
“Even where things are not awful,” Pritzker said, “things are still bad.”
Again urging Illinoisans to observe the three W’s — wear a mask, wash hands, watch social distancing — Pritzker said overwhelmed hospital workers “need your help” in slowing the spread of the coronavirus, and he warned that “an additional statewide action is possible” in imposing mitigation restrictions. He imposed stricter measures on southern Illinois and four Chicago collar counties on Monday.
“Nothing makes a bigger difference in this pandemic than when a community decides to protect your own — by wearing masks, by avoiding gatherings, by temporarily closing high-risk, high-exposure businesses, until we get to a place where it’s safer to open again,” Pritzker said. “We can’t let our guard down.”