Illinois sees its first cases of the virus in the central and southern part of the state. There are more than 60 total cases in Illinois.
The total number of COVID-19 cases in Illinois has increased by 20 and now stands at 66, as of Saturday night, with the first cases discovered in central and southern Illinois, Gov. J.B. Pritzker announced at a press briefing earlier in the day.
Public health officials announced two new positive coronavirus cases Saturday evening in downstate Sangamon County.
DuPage County also registered its first positive test — a woman in her 60s living in a private long-term care facility. The building has been locked down to outside visitors, Pritzker said, and other residents are being carefully monitored to prevent further spread of the virus.
The state still has had no deaths due to COVID-19, officials said.
While announcing yet another day of increasing numbers, the governor expressed frustration at the throngs gathering Saturday for St. Patrick’s weekend celebrations.
“We saw a lot of crowds out and about today, and I need to be frank: We can have a massive, positive effect on bending the transmission curve, thereby saving lives, if people will take this seriously,” Pritzker said.
“We have seen positive results in countries that took aggressive action, and we have seen tragic outcomes in countries that did not. If you are young and healthy, listen up: We need you to follow social distancing guidelines too.”
Though other countries have ordered bars and restaurants closed in an attempt to stem the contagion, the governor indicated he wasn’t ready to press for that.
“We don’t want to put people out of business, but we do want people to act properly in this moment to keep the public safe and healthy,” he said.
Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot seconded that idea after casting an early primary ballot at Northeastern Illinois University’s Avondale campus Saturday.
“We want to encourage people to be smart, go to the local store, buy a six-pack, go at home, celebrate in small groups,” she said. “But clustering and large groups, that’s not effective, and it’s not helpful to help us reinforce, I think, the hygiene issues that we’re very concerned about.”
Health experts have been recommending that people avoid large groups and keep a distance of 6 feet from others. Older people, and those with underlying health issues, are especially susceptible to the virus.
Pritzker has criticized the federal government’s inability to scale up coronavirus testing, but Illinois Department of Public Health Director Dr. Ngozi Ezike said the numbers are finally starting to rise. The agency’s lab processed 300 specimens on Friday, she said, and has done a total of 1,600, representing more than 800 people.
“While this is a growing number for us, we know that many more people are … requesting testing,” Ezike said. “We are starting to see laboratory results from commercial labs, which means we could see a dramatic increase in the number of positives over the coming days and weeks.”
People who believe they might have COVID-19 should first call their doctor, she said. For now, specimens must be collected at a health care facility, but she said the state is working on “more innovative strategies that hopefully are going to be rolled out soon.”
As for containment strategies, the unnamed longterm care facility in DuPage County is a case study. Ezike said hundreds of nursing home operators participated in a conference call in which the state asked them to restrict visitors and conduct assessments of staffers’ and vendors’ health before letting them work.
“It’s the people who are coming in and out who are (the residents’) greatest risk,” she said. “We want the people coming in and out to be healthy and not pose a threat to the people who they’re there to care for.”
The DuPage facility was already practicing those measures, Ezike said. On top of that, she said, staffers are checking residents for symptoms multiple times a day, looking for elevated temperatures even if they fall short of the 100-plus degrees that normally indicate a fever.
Pritzker said in the wake of the virus sweeping nursing homes elsewhere in the country, Illinois tried to plot out the best way to combat the virus in such settings.
“We wanted to get ahead of this and figure out what the right thing to do was, and what mistakes may have been made along the way and to learn from that,” he said. “So that’s why you hear so many precautions that have been activated around this particular nursing home.”
The downstate cases include one in Cumberland County and another in Woodford County, both people in their 70s. Two St. Clair County residents have also tested positive, one a woman in her 60s and the other a woman in her 70s.
In addition to the DuPage County woman and the downstate cases, there were seven new cases in Chicago, four in suburban Cook County, and one each in Lake and Kane counties.