The coronavirus has killed an additional 66 Illinois residents and spread to 3,293 more, state public health officials announced Saturday.
That’s the smallest number of new COVID-19 cases announced in a day by the Illinois Department of Public Health since Oct. 19, mostly because laboratories processed only 54,462 tests on Christmas — far below the state’s daily testing average of more than 91,000 over the last month.
Despite the holiday testing dip, the two-month low case count kept Illinois’ pandemic numbers trending downward following a record-breaking autumn resurgence. The average statewide positivity rate, which indicates how rapidly the virus is spreading, has fallen to 6.8%, its lowest point since Oct. 29.
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Hospital numbers are heading the right direction too, with 4,021 coronavirus patients occupying beds as of Friday night, including 874 receiving intensive care and 494 on ventilators. Those figures have all declined to levels comparable to early November, before the state’s surge went into overdrive.
Saturday’s death total also was the lowest reported by the state since Nov. 29, but the virus has still claimed a brutal average of 107 lives each day over the last week.
Illinois weathered its worst stretch of the pandemic in the first week of December, when about 154 Illinoisans were dying of COVID-19 every day.
Forty-four Chicago-area residents were among the latest victims, including a Cook County man in his 30s.
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Since March, about 934,000 people have been diagnosed with the virus across the state and 15,865 of them have died. Nursing homes and other long-term care facilities account for about half the death toll, with 7,910 fatalities. Statewide, the recovery rate is 98%.
Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s health team has warned of a potential spike in cases due to transmission at holiday gatherings, though Illinois mostly avoided an uptick after Thanksgiving.
Meanwhile, hospitals are working to immunize their health care workers. More than 100,000 Illinoisans had received COVID-19 vaccine doses as of Wednesday, while a federal effort to vaccinate nursing home residents is scheduled to launch next week.
Several months remain before shots will be available to the vast majority of Illinois’ 12.7 million residents.
