ICU bed availability drops in southwest IL as state surpasses 15,000 COVID-19 deaths
The metro-east intensive care unit availability continued to drop Friday, as the state surpassed 15,000 deaths due to COVID-19.
The Illinois Department of Public Health reported 16.8% of staffed intensive care beds in the metro-east were available as of Friday, down from 18% Thursday. Additionally, 17% of the metro-east’s staffed hospital beds were available for patient use, up from 16% Thursday.
Under rules set by the Restore Illinois plan, if a region reaches or falls below the 20% threshold, the state may impose tighter restrictions to avoid the possibility of the region running out of hospital and ICU beds.
Over the past weeks, officials have warned about the possibility of the region running low on hospital and ICU beds, prompting some area hospitals to temporarily cease elective surgeries. More recently, officials have publicly worried that upcoming gatherings during the December holidays could lead to another spike in cases and deaths.
Region 4’s rolling seven-day average positivity rate was 12%, the same as Thursday. The new rate is based on tests recorded as of Dec. 15. A region’s positivity rate is its percentage of positive COVID-19 tests versus the number of tests taken over a seven-day period.
For Tier 3 mitigation metrics to be relaxed or to move to Tier 2, the region must experience a less than 12% seven-day rolling average positivity rate for three consecutive days while also seeing 20% available intensive care unit and medical/surgical bed availability for three consecutive days.
Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker said Thursday numbers are heading in the right direction, but stopped short of saying he’d allow regions to begin reopening, even if they meet metrics.
“When you’re still talking about 8,000 plus cases in a day, that means, as you project forward, quite a number of people will still pass away as a percentage of that,” Pritzker said. “So we’re deeply concerned that we bring the numbers down to a level where we’re seeing much better numbers.”
Tier 3 restrictions went into place statewide on Friday, Nov. 20. The third tier tightens restrictions on indoor dining, bars and social gatherings while adding restrictions to casinos, retailers, video gaming and museums.
The state classifies the metro-east as Region 4, which covers seven counties: St. Clair, Madison, Monroe, Bond, Washington, Clinton and Randolph. County-by-county data is available on the state health department’s website.
Additionally, the region reported a daily positivity rate of 10.3% on Friday, down from 11.3% on Thursday.
State of Illinois announces new cases, deaths
Meanwhile, the state of Illinois announced 7,377 new COVID-19 cases Friday, bringing the total to 886,805. The state health department also announced 181 additional deaths to bring the total to 15,015 since the pandemic began.
Also within the past 24 hours, laboratories have reported 112,292 new tests have been administered for a total of 12,259,595.
As of Thursday, 4,690 people in Illinois were reported to be in the hospital with COVID-19. Of those, 1,023 patients were in the ICU and 589 patients with COVID-19 were on ventilators.
The preliminary seven-day statewide positivity for cases as a percent of total tests from Dec. 11-17 is 9.7%.
This story was originally published December 18, 2020 at 1:03 PM.