While all counties in Illinois except for Carroll County (Substantial Transmission) are categorized as High Transmission COVID-19 counties, Cook County, Lake County, and McHenry County have now additionally been placed under an Illinois Department of Public Health alert for reporting under a 20% availability threshold for ICU beds.
The City of Chicago has dipped below a 20% availability threshold for ICU beds for 11 days.
Suburban Cook County has dipped below a 20% availability threshold for ICU beds for 10 consecutive days.
Both Lake County and McHenry County have dipped below a 20% availability threshold for ICU beds for five days.
Metrics such as the availability of ICU beds, hospitalization increases and positivity rates for COVID-19 tests are used by IDPH and other state health departments to measure the level of virus surge in communities.
The City of Chicago, Cook County, and all the collar counties also reported consecutive increases in COVID-19 hospitalizations, which activated an IDPH alert. Fortunately these counties have positivity rates below 8% for COVID-19 tests. A level of 8% or higher triggers an alert. Statewide, the positivity rate for COVID-19 cases is 5.1% based on a seven-day average.
The news was released on the day that an indoor mask mandate went into effect on Monday, August 23, 2021.
The Illinois Department of Public Health (IDPH) on Friday, August 20, 2021 reported that for the past week, since Friday, August 13, 2021, there were 24,682 new confirmed and probable cases of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) in Illinois, including 126 additional deaths.
New cases of COVID-19 totaled 9,213 over the weekend, and there were 44 more deaths from the respiratory disease, the IDPH reported Monday, August 23, 2021. The statistics included Saturday, Sunday, and Monday with 4,203 new infections on Saturday, 2,007 on Sunday and 3,003 on Monday. The seven-day average for cases is 3,538. Labs processed 71,247 virus tests in the last 72 hours.
A total of 6,696,960 people have been fully vaccinated, nearly 52.6% of Illinois’ 12.7 million population. From Friday, August 20, 2021 through Sunday, August 22, 2021, there were 67,495 more COVID-19 shots administered. The seven-day average for vaccinations is 23,635.
The federal government has delivered 15,902,195 doses of vaccine to Illinois since distribution began in mid-December 2020, and 13,813,317 shots have been administered.
Total cases statewide stand at 1,491,582, and 23,761 Illinoisans have died since the pandemic began, according to the IDPH.
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