Public health officials on Wednesday said 102,390 more vaccine doses have gone into Illinois arms.
Tuesday’s shot total marked the state’s first six-figure vaccination day since March 12 and increased Illinois’ overall vaccination tally to almost 4.3 million doses administered over the past three months.
From that total, just over 1.6 million residents have been fully immunized, or 12.6% of the population, according to the Illinois Department of Public Health.
About 28% of residents 16 or older have gotten at least one shot, and about 58% of people 65 or older have gotten a dose, according to Gov. J.B. Pritzker.
The state is now averaging 102,223 shots administered per day over the past week.
COVID-19 vaccine doses administered by day
Graphic by Jesse Howe and Caroline Hurley | Sun-Times
Source: Illinois Department of Public Health
Graph not displaying properly? Click here.
While that figure fell slightly from an all-time high set a day earlier, coronavirus infections have dipped to all-time lows across the state.
Officials reported 1,655 new cases of the disease were diagnosed among 77,798 tests, decreasing Illinois’ average positivity rate slightly to 2.2%, lower than it ever fell last summer.
Hospital admissions are near a record low, too, with 1,143 beds occupied by COVID-19 patients as of Tuesday night.
But the virus claimed 17 more lives, including those of a Cook County woman in her 40s and a Grundy County man in his 30s.
Roughly 26 Illinoisans have died of COVID-19 each day over the past week, a fatality rate that has dipped about 43% over the past month.
Despite that progress, Pritzker warned another surge like the one Illinois suffered last fall isn’t out of the question, especially with three more infectious variants of the virus detected in the state.
“We want to be careful here. These variants move faster than the original COVID-19,” Pritzker said at a Decatur vaccination site in central Illinois. “We have to react more quickly… Having said that, let me be clear to everybody: I am more optimistic today than I have ever been throughout this pandemic, about where we are going and getting to the end of the pandemic.”
Over the past year, more than 1.2 million residents have contracted COVID-19, and 20,988 of them have died.
New COVID-19 cases by day
Graphic by Jesse Howe and Caroline Hurley | Sun-Times
Source: Illinois Department of Public Health
