Hospital bed availability drops in southwestern IL as COVID-19 case rate increases
Staffed hospital bed availability dropped sharply in the metro-east Monday as the region’s case rate increased again.
As of Tuesday, 17.7% of the metro-east’s staffed hospital beds were available for patient use, down from 21.5% Monday. The metro-east’s hospital bed availability has been over the state-set threshold for three consecutive days after weeks of being under 20%.
Meanwhile, the region’s intensive care unit availability continued to improve Tuesday, reaching 25.1% availability, up from 23.6% Monday.
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 testing 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 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.
Officials have continued to stress the possibility of the region running low on hospital and ICU beds, prompting some area hospitals to temporarily cease elective surgeries. Additionally, officials say they 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 12.1% Tuesday, up from 11.7% on Monday. The new rate is based on tests recorded as of Dec. 26. A region’s positivity rate is the 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 14.5% on Tuesday, up from 10.7% on Monday.
State of Illinois announces new cases, deaths
Meanwhile, the state of Illinois announced 5,644 new COVID-19 cases Tuesday, bringing the total to 948,006. The state health department also announced 106 additional deaths to bring the total to 16,179 since the pandemic began.
Also within the past 24 hours, laboratories have reported 66,786 new tests have been administered for a total of 13,103,444.
As of Monday, when the latest data was available, 4,313 people in Illinois were reported to be in the hospital with COVID-19. Of those, 904 patients were in the ICU and 506 patients with COVID-19 were on ventilators.
The preliminary seven-day statewide positivity for cases as a percent of total tests from Dec. 22-28 is 7.4%.