Hospital bed, ICU availability improves in southwestern Illinois as COVID-19 rate dips
Hospital bed and intensive care unit availability improved Monday in the metro-east as the region’s positivity rate dipped below 12%.
As of Monday, 21.5% of the metro-east’s staffed hospital beds were available for patient use, up from 21.4% Sunday. The metro-east’s hospital bed availability has been over the state-set threshold for two consecutive days after weeks of being under 20%.
Additionally, the region’s intensive care unit availability was at 23.6% on Monday, up from 21.5% Sunday.
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.
However, Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker has said he isn’t ready to lift mitigations on the state, even as some regions see caseloads and hospitalizations and ICU usage decrease.
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.
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. Officials also worry a spike of new COVID-19 cases could be on the way due to Christmas celebrations.
Region 4’s rolling seven-day average positivity rate was 11.7% Monday, down 12% from Sunday. The new rate is based on tests recorded as of Dec. 25. 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.
Additionally, the region reported a daily positivity rate of 10.7% on Monday, down from 12.4% on Sunday.
State of Illinois announces new cases, deaths
Meanwhile, the state of Illinois announced 4,453 new COVID-19 cases Monday, bringing the total to 942,362. The state health department also announced 105 additional deaths to bring the total to 16,074 since the pandemic began.
Also within the past 24 hours, laboratories have reported 51,046 new tests have been administered for a total of 13,036,658.
As of Sunday, when the latest data was available, 4,243 people in Illinois were reported to be in the hospital with COVID-19. Of those, 884 patients were in the ICU and 515 patients with COVID-19 were on ventilators.
The preliminary seven-day statewide positivity for cases as a percent of total tests from Dec. 21-27 is 7.2%.
This story was originally published December 28, 2020 at 12:27 PM.