More than a quarter-million people across Illinois have now been fully vaccinated against COVID-19, public health officials announced Thursday.
The state passed that benchmark as the Illinois Department of Public Health reported 62,318 doses went into arms Wednesday, the second highest single-day vaccination total, trailing only the previous day’s 65,166 doses.
The federal government has shipped about 2.2 million vaccine doses to the state, and almost 1.2 million have been administered so far.
Seven weeks into the unprecedented vaccination effort, a total of 256,839 people have received both required doses. That’s barely 2% of the population.
Health officials are aiming to vaccinate at least 80% of the population to achieve herd immunity. That would take many months at the current rate, but efforts have ramped up in Phase 1B of Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s distribution plan. Daily shot records have been set four times in the past week, while the seven-day average of shots administered per day is up to 46,709.
Meanwhile, infection rates have sunk to their lowest levels in four months. Officials announced 3,328 new cases of the disease were diagnosed among 101,307 tests, lowering the state’s rolling positivity rate to 3.4%. That key indicator of transmission hadn’t been that low since Oct. 6.
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And COVID-19 hospital admissions have fallen 62% from the worst days of the pandemic in mid-November. As of Wednesday night, coronavirus patients occupied 2,341 beds statewide.
But officials also reported 69 more deaths attributed to the virus. COVID-19 is still claiming about 54 Illinois lives per day on average, but that fatality rate has fallen by half compared to the first week of January.
Thirty-seven of the latest victims were from the Chicago area, including a Cook County man in his 40s.
The state’s coronavirus death toll has climbed to 19,444 among more than 1.1 million people who have been infected since last March.
