The coronavirus has killed another 146 Illinois residents and spread to 7,123 more, public health officials announced Wednesday.
The new cases were diagnosed among 93,278 tests submitted to the Illinois Department of Public Health, lowering the state’s average positivity rate to 8.5%.
That number, which indicates how rapidly the virus is spreading, has gradually decreased along with other key metrics since Illinois’ autumn resurgence skyrocketed to all-time highs in mid-November.
Hospitals across the state were treating 4,793 COVID-19 patients as of Tuesday night — still comparable to the burden hospitals faced during the first wave in the spring, but the first time the number of occupied beds has dipped below 4,800 since Nov. 9.
Intensive care unit occupancy also decreased slightly to 1,045 patients statewide, as did the number of those on ventilators, down to 590.
But COVID-19 deaths are still accumulating at a staggering rate. The latest 146 deaths are above average for the state over the last month in which nearly 4,000 people have died of the respiratory disease.
That accounts for almost a third of the state’s death toll over nine months of the pandemic, which is now up to 14,655. The latest victims included 62 Chicago-area residents.
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Aside from some slight increases in positivity rates in several Chicago-area regions, the state apparently avoided the severe post-Thanksgiving “surge upon a surge,” keeping numbers trending in the right direction as a massive vaccination campaign gets underway.
“We are starting to head in the right direction,” Illinois Public Health Director Dr. Ngozi Ezike said Tuesday. “So many of you have sacrificed and employed all of the public health mitigations, and I thank you …. We still do have many more months to go, but let’s continue toward that light at the end of the tunnel.”
Since March, 12 million COVID-19 tests have been administered in the state and 870,600 people have tested positive. The recovery rate is 97%.
