Illinois set a record for a second straight day Wednesday with 55,865 people receiving COVID-19 vaccinations statewide, public health officials reported Thursday.
That tops the 53,628 shots that were doled out Tuesday, as vaccine administration ramps up this week entering Phase 1B of Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s distribution plan.
A total of 829,428 shots have gone into arms statewide in the six weeks since the federal government shipped out the first doses six weeks ago — but only 178,684 Illinoisans have received the required two doses. That’s just 1.4% of the population.
Pritzker has urged patience for the 3.2 million essential workers and people 65 or older who are now eligible to receive shots, but he said efforts will be bolstered with $43 million in new federal funding and a 16% increase in weekly vaccine deliveries promised by President Joe Biden’s administration.
“We’re expanding our vaccination capability across the state of Illinois,” Pritzker said after touring a vaccination site set up at Morton East High School in Cicero. Federal dollars will be given to local health departments, which are responsible for immunizing their own communities.
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22266152/Screen_Shot_2021_01_28_at_12.56.28_PM.png)
“The average number of doses per day that’s being administered is going up significantly,” Pritzker said. “We’re going on a good trajectory. … Between the Biden administration’s increasing the number of doses, and our build-out of all of these facilities to deliver those doses, you’re seeing the effect of that in the record number of doses administered yesterday.”
Over the last week, an average of 36,768 doses have been administered per day.
While the vaccination rate slowly increases, the state’s coronavirus death toll passed 19,000 Thursday as officials announced the virus claimed an additional 103 lives — the most daily deaths reported in a week. Seventy of the latest victims were from the Chicago area.
About 1.1 million residents have been infected over the past year, and 19,067 have died. The recovery rate is 98%.
It took two weeks for the state to log its latest 1,000 coronavirus deaths, compared to nine days for the toll to climb from 17,000 to 18,000. It was a full month from the start of the pandemic until the state logged its first 1,000 deaths in mid-April.
The death rate has slowed considerably over the past two months, with COVID-19 claiming an average of 79 lives per day over the last week, roughly half the pace at the start of December.
Graph not displaying properly? Click here.
Infection rates and COVID-19 hospital admissions have also fallen by about 50% over that span. Officials announced another 4,191 new cases of the disease diagnosed among 100,119 tests, lowering the average statewide positivity rate to 4.3% — the lowest it’s been since Oct. 12.
As of Wednesday night, 2,802 hospital beds across the state were taken up by COVID-19 patients. That’s still about double the nightly hospitalization rate the state saw for most of last summer, but it’s less than half the November peak.
