BREAKING: Illinois Warned Of ‘Significantly Greater Mitigations’ For Covid, How Will They Impact You?
BREAKING NEWS: As covid numbers continue to spike higher, and officials dread numbers after the bustling Labor Day weekend celebrations, Illinois Gov. JB Pritkzer has warned the state could be hit with “significantly greater mitigations” if the state’s covid metrics continue to slide downward.
New covid-19 cases statewide jumped 18.3 percent over the past week, with nearly 6,000 reported today so far alone, according to statistics
Illinois’ covid positivity has continued to rise.
from Covid-19 Illinois. Nearly every county is now at a ‘warning level’ for Covid-19, and the entirety of Southern Illinois has only one ICU bed available, the site noted. For a county to reach “warning level,” it must have below 20% ICU bed capacity.
In a press conference last week, Gov. J.B. Pritzker spoke somberly, saying “significantly greater mitigations” could be imposed if the numbers continue to decline. This was before the most recent numbers were announced.
“We’re consistently looking at the menu of options that we may need to impose in order to bring down the numbers,” Pritzker said. “I will remind you that if we are not able to bring these numbers down, if hospitals continue to fill, if the hospital beds and ICUs get full like they are in Kentucky -that’s just next door to Illinois – if that happens, we’re going to have to impose significantly greater mitigations.
“We are living in a very dangerous moment of coronavirus, an upswing of the delta variant across the nation and here in Illinois,” he added. “I am deeply concerned especially that the delta variant is having an increasingly serious medical impact on younger people, not just young children who attend school, but older kids in high school and the young teachers who come to work at schools every day and so we’re trying simply to ask people to make sure that people are following a mitigation that we know works.”
Illinois ranked 35th among the states where coronavirus was spreading the fastest on a per-person basis, a USA TODAY Network analysis of
Illinois Governor JB Pritzker announces the new mitigations last week.
Johns Hopkins University data shows. In the latest week, coronavirus cases in the United States increased 5.2% from the week before, with 1,146,098 cases reported. With 3.81% of the country’s population, Illinois had 2.65% of the country’s cases in the last week. Across the country, 44 states had more cases in the latest week than they did in the week before.
According to data from Johns Hopkins University, 1,538,324 people in Illinois have tested positive for the coronavirus since the pandemic began, and 26,500 people have died from covid-19.
Illinois began a new round of mitigations last week.
Everyone is required to wear a mask indoors in public settings — everywhere from businesses to government buildings to other venues — and
Illinois has seen a new surge of cases of the delta variant since the beginning of August.
to social distance at outdoor events. The mask mandate applies to anyone over the age of two, regardless of vaccination status, echoing the same mask mandate brought back to Chicago two weeks ago, and to Cook County surrounding Chicagoland last week.
All educational system and healthcare system employees will be mandated to get the covid-19 vaccination or submit to regular testing for covid. All higher education employees and students will also be mandated to get the covid-19 vaccine.
In early August, Pritzker announced Illinois students preschool through 12 would be required to wear masks during school and indoor sports and activities, as reported on QuadCities.com. That requirement for kids to wear masks in all schools remains in effect.
However, despite the dour outlook overall, not all has been negative.
Cases in 21 of the 102 counties statewide fell last week, including drops in Rock Island, Grundy, Monroe and Randolph counties.
In addition, Illinois has the 15th highest share of its citizens having at least one vaccine shot, and Illinois rate of 66.4 percent is higher than the national rate of 62.3 according to CDC numbers.
For more ongoing coverage of this situation, stay tuned to your free, fact-based alternative media, QuadCities.com.
