CHICAGO _ The Cook County medical examiner already has ruled on 10,000 deaths for the year, nearly 4,000 more than in all of 2019, with about half of this year's cases involving COVID-19-related deaths, Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle said Wednesday.
But while the county passed 5,000 deaths from the pandemic last week, it also is seeing increases in opioid deaths, homicides and suicides, with Black residents shouldering a disproportionate amount of the increases, Preckwinkle said.
"Each one was preventable," Preckwinkle said. "As a community, we must do better."
The medical examiner already has had 3,800 more cases than in 2019, according to Medical Examiner Dr. Ponni Arunkumar. The only other years with over 10,000 since the office transitioned from a coroner's office to a medical examiner's office were in 1977, 1978 and 1979, when the office's responsibilities for signing death certificates were much broader, Arunkumar said.
If COVID-19 deaths were removed from the equation, the county would still be on track to handle about the same number of cases as in 1995, when over 700 people died during a heat wave in a five-day period in July.
While the county's population is about 24% African American, 33% of countywide coronavirus deaths are suffered by Black residents, about half of opioid deaths are Black and three-quarters of homicide victims are Black, Preckwinkle said. Ninety-four% of homicide victims are either Black or Latino, she said.
Illinois announced 2,157 new confirmed cases of COVID-19 Wednesday for a total of 225,627. The state also announced 37 new deaths for a total of 7,954 and 50,362 new test results for a total of 3.83 million.
The medical examiner surpassed 2019's 6,274 cases back in May. The office has expressed concern about running out of room to handle all the bodies.
