Hospital bed, ICU availability continues to fall in southwestern Illinois
The metro-east’s hospital bed and intensive care unit availability continued to fall Tuesday ahead of Christmas celebrations that some officials worry could bring on a spike in COVID-19 cases.
As of Tuesday, 15.6% of the metro-east’s staffed hospital beds were available for patient use, down from 16% Monday. The metro-east’s hospital bed availability has been under that threshold since Nov. 16. The region’s intensive care unit availability was at 17.4% on Tuesday, down from 17.7% on Monday..
Officials in St. Clair County said Monday the upcoming celebrations of Christmas and New Year’s could bring on another spike of COVID-19 cases that could reverse a trend of falling numbers over the past week. St. Clair County Emergency Management Agency Director Herb Simmons asked the public to avoid large gatherings in an effort to avoid spreading the virus.
Simmons said a spike of new cases could overload local hospitals that are already nearly full with patients.
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.
Region 4’s rolling seven-day average positivity rate was 11.6% Tuesday, down from 11.7 Monday, making it three consecutive days that the rate has been below 12%. The new rate is based on tests recorded as of Dec. 19. A region’s positivity rate is its percentage of positive COVID-19 tests versus the number of tests taken over a seven-day period.
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.
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.
But last week Pritzker said that while numbers are heading in the right direction, the state may not be ready for relaxed mitigations in any of its 11 regions. State health officials also are worried about upcoming holiday gatherings and the possible effect on new cases further straining hospital capacity, he said.
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.
Additionally, the region reported a daily positivity rate of 11.1% on Tuesday, up from 12.8% on Monday.
State of Illinois announces new cases, deaths
Meanwhile, the state of Illinois announced 6,239 new COVID-19 cases Tuesday, bringing the total to 911,308. The state health department also announced 116 additional deaths to bring the total to 15,2414 since the pandemic began.
Also within the past 24 hours, laboratories have reported 84,764 new tests have been administered for a total of 12,605,743.
As of Monday, when the latest data was available, 4,571 people in Illinois were reported to be in the hospital with COVID-19. Of those, 981 patients were in the ICU and 557 patients with COVID-19 were on ventilators.
The preliminary seven-day statewide positivity for cases as a percent of total tests from Dec. 15-21 is 7.4%.