BREAKING: Illinois Covid Restrictions Could Be Dropped If Numbers Fall, But How Soon?
BREAKING: Illinois covid restrictions could be reduced or dropped within the next week or two if covid numbers continue to fall, Illinois Public Health Department director Dr. Ngozi Ezike told WQAD-TV8’s Jim Mertens in an interview this weekend.
“As we pass the peak of Omicron and those numbers continue to fall,” Dr. Ngozi Ezike said, “As that number continues to go down, we will be at a level where we can think about taking off that mask because we can handle in our hospitals, the load of patients and everybody can get the care they need.”
“We know that the deaths will come down,” said Dr. Ezike. “We know that the deaths lag after the hospitalization and so since we are seeing the hospitalized patients, those numbers are coming down, the deaths associated with that will come down.”
Dr. Ngozi Ezike
Covid numbers in the state have been up and down and up again over the last week, but have declined overall compared to just two weeks ago. As reported on QuadCities.com, on Friday, after declining cases over the past week, and a day in which we were below 10,000 cases for the first time in several months, Illinois public health officials reported 15,732 new COVID cases and 143 related deaths Wednesday.
In addition, after a day in which the positivity rate went down to under 13 percent, it bumped back up again to 14.6 percent.
There have been 2,867,299 total COVID cases, including 30,419 deaths in the state since the pandemic began. Within the past 24 hours, laboratories have reported testing 143,139 new specimens for a total of 50,359,271 since the pandemic began.
Colleges are encouraging students to get vaccinated to prevent the spread of covid.
Currently, 5,019 patients in Illinois are in the hospital with covid and 877 patients were in the ICU with 503 patients on ventilators with covid.
A total of 22,983,745 vaccine doses have been administered in Illinois as of Tuesday and 61.85 percent of the state’s population is fully vaccinated. The seven-day rolling average of vaccines administered daily is 39,760.
“Timing is everything, you obviously can’t have the vaccine the day a variant comes out, so by the time it is available omicron might be in the rear view mirror,” said Dr. Ezike, in a previous covid address on Facebook live. “We don’t know what is in store, but we are grateful the current vaccines have been able to do the job and keep fully vaccinated people out of the hospital.”
Most of the hospitalizations for covid are unvaccinated people.
“Over the last two years, I’ve said over and over that you don’t know when a surge has reached its peak until you’re on the other side of it,” Gov. JB Pritzker said during a recent covid update.
The number of deaths is expected to fall as the omicron surge passes, but covid is expected to linger, albeit likely in a less deadly form, same as the flu has, experts agree.
“I am very, very pleased to say that we have formally passed the omicron peak here in the city of Chicago,” Chicago Department of Public Health Commissioner Dr. Allison Arwady said last week in an online covid update.
All of the Illinois health regions have shown declining numbers compared to a few weeks ago.
Arwady said the city will be lifting restrictions “at some point,” but said it depended on the numbers continuing to go down.
“I have to admit that I think we are looking to a future where covid is a part of our lives,” said Dr. Ezike in her interview with Mertens. “So instead of feeling like we are constantly in crisis mode with covid, we need to get to the point where we’re just co-existing with covid.”
Illinois residents are beginning to protest to end the restrictions, particularly in schools. A group of over 700 parents has also filed a class action lawsuit to remove the mask and testing mandate from Illinois schools.
For ongoing coverage of this situation, continue to follow QuadCities.com.
