State officials announced on Sunday that Chicago had made enough progress in the fight against COVID-19 to return to Phase 4 of Governor JB Pritzker’s resurgence plan across the state, but the recently reopened bars and restaurants will remain in their current capacity.
The positive rate of coronavirus testing in Chicago remained below 6.5% for the third consecutive day, paving the way for Chicago to leave the state’s Level 1 restrictions and enter Phase 4 for the first time since November.
The city switched to Tier 1 last week, allowing bars and restaurants to accommodate customers indoors with 25% capacity or 25 people per room, whichever is less.
In Phase 4, merchants are allowed to operate at 50% capacity or serve less than 50 people at once, whichever is less, but Mayor Lori Lightfoot said in a statement on Saturday that the rush to expand capacity very quickly it would be “irresponsible”.
“With case rates and positivity even higher than before the second increase, now is the time to keep the safeguards in place to ensure continued progress and, hopefully, prevent any reversal in the future,” said the mayor.
In Phase 4, indoor recreational businesses, such as bowling and skating rinks, can reopen and operate at 40% capacity or have less than 50 customers, whichever is less, and establishments must stop serving alcoholic drinks at 11 pm and nearby midnight, state officials said. Several groups can also meet in the same place, as long as they are socially distant and in different rooms.
More than half of the state’s 11 regions have returned to Phase 4, with the southern suburbs of Will and Kankakee on their way to join the majority in that phase on Monday. Meanwhile, Regions 8, 9 and 10 – which cover the suburbs of Cook County and the northern and western suburbs – are still under Level 1 mitigations, and the Metro East region is under Level 2.
This occurred when Illinois’s seven-day positivity rate fell to its lowest point in nearly four months on Sunday.
State health officials announced 2,428 new confirmed and probable cases of COVID-19, which were diagnosed among the 86,871 tests reported to the Illinois Department of Public Health on the last day for a daily positivity rate of about 2.8%. This is the lowest number of new cases recorded in a day since October 6.
The positivity rate across the state dropped to 3.9%, dropping below 4% for the first time since October 9. That number, which experts use to assess how quickly the virus is spreading, has been steadily declining since its peak in January at 8.6. % on January 4 and fell almost a full percentage point last week.
The state health authority also announced that another 36,851 coronavirus vaccines were administered on Saturday, bringing the total number of vaccines issued in the state to 981,988. About 16% of these injections were given to people in long-term care facilities.
As vaccine distribution continues, COVID-19 hospitalizations in Illinois have returned to the level they were before a resurgence in late autumn devastated the state. On Saturday, 2,467 beds were occupied throughout the state by patients with coronavirus, with 538 of those patients in intensive care units and 289 in ventilators, officials said.
The virus has claimed an average of 70 lives a day in the past week. On Sunday, health officials reported 40 more deaths related to the virus.
More than half of Sunday’s fatalities have been reported in the Chicago area, including a Cook County woman in her 30s and two Cook County men in her 40s.
In the past 11 months, more than 1.1 million people in Illinois have contracted the respiratory virus and 19,203 have died. The state has a 98% recovery rate.