As Chicago breaks a record for the number of positive COVID cases since January, Chicago Department of Public Health Commissioner Dr. Allison Arwady said that she expects the rapidly spreading omicron COVID-19 variant to be detected in the city within a number of days.
The number of COVID cases in the state of Illinois continued its steady upward trend on Monday, with 8,700 new cases of the virus reported over the last 24 hours.
According to the Illinois Department of Public Health, the state’s number of new COVID cases per day has continued to rise rapidly following the Thanksgiving holiday. On average, the state is seeing 7,146 new cases of COVID per day, the highest the average has risen since Dec. 20, 2020.
On Saturday, the state reported 6,374 new probable and confirmed cases of the virus, with another 4,036 cases reported on Sunday.
Those new case numbers are also coinciding with increased testing across the state, with Illinois reporting more new COVID tests per day than it has at any point during the pandemic. On Thursday, the state set a new record by reporting 231,876 new COVID test results, and while ensuing days have fallen short of that mark, they are still at high levels, with 148,527 results returned on Monday alone.
On average, the state is receiving 153,311 COVID test results per day, the highest number the state has recorded since the pandemic began.
Even with the caveat that the state is conducting more COVID tests than ever before, the state’s positivity rate is still on the rise, moving to 4.7% on all tests and 5.4% on individuals tested, according to IDPH.
On Monday, the state reported 14 new deaths related to COVID-19, a departure from a recent trend of increasing fatalities connected to the virus. Over the last seven days, the state has reported an average of 33 new deaths per day, approaching levels last seen during the height of the delta-driven surge in the virus earlier this year.
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The state is now averaging 68,730 new COVID vaccinations per day, with 44,656 doses of COVID vaccine administered in the last 24 hours. That average number of new vaccinations has risen steadily in recent weeks, according to IDPH data.
As of Monday morning, there are 2,842 COVID patients currently hospitalized in Illinois, the most the state has seen since late January, according to IDPH data.
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Of those patients, 579 are in intensive care unit beds, with 256 on staffed ventilators, according to state data. The former number is the highest it’s been since Sept. 21, 2021, according to IDPH.
