More restrictions coming to south, west suburbs as state sees another day of 10K-plus COVID cases
As COVID-19 continues to spread at a startling rate in Illinois, Gov. J.B. Pritzker on Monday announced that suburbs to the south and west of Cook County, as well as part of southern Illinois, will face tighter restrictions beginning Wednesday.
Restrictions include a prohibition of gatherings of more than 10 people for both indoor and outdoor spaces and a six-per-party limit for outdoor restaurant and bar service.
The southern suburbs are in Will and Kankakee counties, which make up Region 7 on the state’s COVID map. The western suburbs are in Kane and DuPage counties, known as Region 8. The state’s southern tip is Region 5.
Positivity rates in each region have climbed in recent days. Of the three, Region 7 in the south suburbs was experiencing the worst seven-day infection average: 16.4% as of Friday.
The announcement came as state health officials announced 10,573 new coronavirus cases, marking the fourth consecutive day Illinois has recorded a five-figure caseload.
“As the weather turns cooler and more activity is driven inside, we may have a real problem on our hands,” Pritzker said.
“Our new daily cases are up nearly 380% since Oct. 1, our statewide test positivity is up over 180% in the last five weeks and both our statewide COVID hospitalizations and deaths per day are up more than 150% in the same time period,” Pritzker said.
“The virus is winning the war right now,” he said.
Prior to Pritzker’s announcement at a Monday news conference, Region 1, in the northwest corner of Illinois, was the only one of the state’s 11 regions to be placed on “tier two” mitigation measures.
The region has faced tougher restrictions since late October with little success; the infection rate remains above 17%.
Pritzker blamed the lack of progress on the fact that the region borders Wisconsin and Iowa, where virus spread is exponentially worse.
State health officials also reported 14 coronavirus-related deaths on Monday, raising Illinois’ death toll to 10,210. Of the new fatalities, two were under age 60.
Illinois is averaging about 9,710 new infections each day this month, up sharply from October’s daily average of 3,777.
The new infections announced Monday, which bring the state’s total to 498,560 cases over the past nine months, were detected among the latest batch of 64,760 tests. The seven- day average testing positivity rate was 11.4% — up from 8%
about a week ago.
Chicago, which is Region 11, has an infection rate of 12.4%, up from 9.5% a week ago. The average daily caseload now stands at 1,599, up 41% from the 1,134 cases per day a week ago.
Lightfoot plans ‘surgical’ strike in specific neighborhoods
Mayor Lori Lightfoot said Monday she is “very concerned about the trajectory” of coronavirus cases but not enough to order another stay-at-home shutdown of the city.
Instead, expect a “surgical” strike in specific neighborhoods when additional mitigations are announced later this week.
“When the pandemic first hit Chicago, all of us were kind of scrambling to figure out what was it, how deadly was it, how is it trans
mitted. We used a lot of broad and, candidly, blunt tools because we were at the very early stages of our learning. We know a lot more now about the virus and how it works,” the mayor said after a groundbreaking in Humboldt Park.
“We’ve got to use a surgeon’s knife and not a blunt ax. In thinking about the next steps, that is really the mindset that we are taking. We have a sense of what the challenges are. Where in our city — down to the block level and census tract — those challenges are,” she said.
“So the next set of interventions that we will announce are gonna be focused on really trying to make a difference in those areas using tools that we think are the best levers to pull given the challenges that we’re facing.”
Some Chicago hospitals recently
began severely restricting visitors in light of rising COVID-19 cases. Advocate Health Care, the state’s largest health system with 10 hospitals, went to a no-visitor policy last week, though there are a number of exceptions. The visitation restrictions apply to both COVID-19 patients and those in the hospital for other reasons.
Rush University Medical Center and University of Illinois Chicago hospitals also recently imposed bans on most visitors.
The Rush policy was tightened at the end of October “as cases across the city began to rise and is driven by the need to limit the risk of spread and to help flatten the curve across the Chicago area,” a hospital spokesman said.