NOTE: Watch Lightfoot and Arwady speak live at 1 p.m. in the player above
Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot and the city's top doctor are expected to deliver an update on COVID-19 in the city Thursday afternoon.
Lightfoot and Chicago Department of Public Health Commissioner Dr. Allison Arwady, alongside other local officials, will speak from City Hall at 1 p.m., according to the mayor's public schedule.
It's not clear what the mayor and doctor plan to discuss, but the city postponed a travel order update on Tuesday due to the election and said an announcement would instead be made later in the week.
Chicago, along with the rest of Illinois, is currently under heightened coronavirus mitigations imposed by state, despite opposition from Lightfoot, which has led to the closure of indoor dining and bar service citywide.
But as positivity rates, cases and hospitalizations continue to rise across the state, it remains unclear when such mitigations might be lifted.
The city is currently averaging a case rate higher than it ever saw during the original "peak" of coronavirus in early May, averaging more than 1,100 new diagnoses per day. That's more than 40 cases a day for every 100,000 residents, well exceeding the city's 15 cases per day requirement for states to be added to its travel order requiring a quarantine.
According to the latest data from CDPH, the city's positivity rate is currently at 10.9%, well above the 8% threshold requiring stricter mitigations from the state and a significant increase from the 8.2% reported one week earlier. In order to have such restrictions lifted, the city would need to drop to 6.5% or lower for three consecutive days.
