Illinois appears to be past the peak of its largest COVID-19 surge so far as cases and hospitalizations driven by the omicron variant are starting to decline, but officials urged continued caution as the state’s health care system remains under unprecedented strain.
Gov. J.B. Pritzker on Wednesday called the latest trend “a welcome change after precipitous increases over the prior seven weeks.”
“I want to be clear: I am cautiously optimistic about this decline,” Pritzker said during a news conference at the Thompson Center in the Loop. “But there are an awful lot of people still battling for their lives in hospitals across Illinois.”
Over the past week, the state has averaged 26,646 new confirmed and probable cases of COVID-19 per day, down 18% from the previous week, when average daily cases peaked at a record of 32,501. Prior to the latest onslaught, the record was an average of 12,384 daily cases during the fall 2020 surge, before vaccines were available.
Crystal Carey, director of the emergency department, checks a completely full board of patients on Jan. 12, 2022, at Loretto Hospital in Chicago. (Brian Cassella / Chicago Tribune)
Researchers and health officials don’t rely solely on case counts to gauge the direction of the pandemic because the figures depend in part on people voluntarily testing, while the results of at-home tests that have proliferated during the latest wave aren’t reported to the state.
With omicron generally causing milder illness than previous strains, particularly among the vaccinated, officials during the latest surge were more focused on the number of patients with COVID-19 filling hospital beds across the state.
Chicago Public Schools to shorten quarantine time for students and staff as city passes omicron peak ？
That number also has declined. As of Tuesday night, the state was averaging 6,920 COVID-19 patients in hospitals per day, after setting records for hospitalizations less than a week earlier when the average number of patients per day peaked at 7,245 for the seven days ending Jan. 13. Before the latest surge, the record was 6,119 per day, set during the fall 2020 surge.
“You can’t hide a hospitalization,” Dr. Ngozi Ezike, director the Illinois Department of Public Health said Wednesday. “And so as we look at those hospitalizations and understand where those numbers are going, that is definitely a clear signal of the direction we’re moving in.”
Another promising sign has been a drop in the average daily rates of people admitted to the hospital with COVID-19-like symptoms.
Statewide, the rate plateaued about two weeks ago, at nearly 6 patients per 100,000 residents. The rate remained there for about a week before dropping below 5. Decreases have been seen, in varying degrees, in nearly all of Illinois’ 11 designated health regions, with the most pronounced drop in Chicago. Its admittance rate has slid from 6.7 to 4.6, although that’s still far above the rate of 0.8 in early November.
Late last week, the state health department said an updated analysis showed 90% of those who were hospitalized with COVID-19 at the time were unvaccinated.
Chicago’s top health official on Wednesday said the city also has moved past the peak of the omicron surge, and also urged caution.
“I am very, very pleased to say that we have formally passed the omicron peak here in the city of Chicago,” city public health Commissioner Dr. Allison Arwady said at a separate news conference. “However, we are a long way from being out of the woods, and it’s really important over these next few weeks and months that we continue to work hard on getting folks vaccinated, getting folks tested, continuing to wear masks, because there’s a long way to come down.”
Chicago is averaging nearly 3,000 new cases a day, after reaching almost 6,000 cases a day in early January, and hospitalizations are also down, according to city data.
Crystal Carey, director of the emergency department at Loretto Hospital, second from right, and registered nurse Sandra Weeks, right, set up an additional bed in the hallway next to the nursing station as paramedics arrive with a patient on Jan. 12, 2022. (Brian Cassella / Chicago Tribune)
“Our hospital beds, in terms of the number of people in the hospital with COVID, is just under 1,500 across Chicago hospitals, also just gently decreasing, and then our (intensive care unit) capacity has actually stayed in that high-transmission or high-risk category,” Arwady said. “We’re currently averaging just over 300 people in the ICU with COVID.”
City officials also announced Wednesday that all U.S. states remain on Chicago’s optional travel advisory for unvaccinated people for the third week in a row.
Illinois is not on the list because the city does not want to restrict intrastate travel, but the other 49 states and four territories are all places where officials are strongly advising unvaccinated people take extra COVID-19 precautions when visiting. That guidance includes getting tested one to three days before departure and, when returning to the city, getting a PCR test three to five days after travel and quarantining for five days — even if the test result was negative.
Despite the optimistic data from city and state, hospitals in Chicago and across Illinois remain jammed at levels not seen even in the worst times of earlier surges.
The Tribune has previously reported how short-staffed hospitals were struggling to keep as many beds available as there were during previous surges, particularly in intensive care units. That has led to emergency rooms backing up with so-called boarders unable to be placed in inpatient rooms, which has exacerbated the region’s health inequity.
Even with the more promising COVID-19 numbers, hospitals are still coping with high levels of non-COVID patients, many of whom delayed care earlier in the pandemic and are coming in sicker and staying longer, doctors and nurses have said.
State regulators say hospitals become “seriously stressed” in regions where bed availability drops below 20%. And ICU availability has yet to climb above that threshold in Chicago or any of the regions surrounding it.
“We are still very much in a period of immense strain for our health care systems,” Pritzker said. “So we must do all that we can to keep our health care workers and institutions operating and available to all who may need medical assistance.”
State health officials on Wednesday reported another 160 fatalities, the largest daily death toll in more than a year.
Deaths are a lagging indicator of the virus’s reach, but so far a much smaller proportion of those who’ve gotten sick in the latest surge have died than in earlier phases of the pandemic. The average number of deaths peaked at 155 per day in early December 2020, just before vaccine distribution began and about three weeks after cases crested.
As of Wednesday, the statewide death toll stood at 29,510 since the start of the pandemic. With 12 days remaining, more deaths already have been recorded this month, 1,593, than in any month since January 2021.
“We have lost so many people in recent weeks. ... Despite the recent indications of fewer new infections and fewer new hospital admissions ahead, it breaks my heart to know that in the coming weeks, hundreds more may die among the thousands who are already seriously ill from COVID,” Pritzker said. “Again, the vast majority of those are among the unvaccinated.”
Even though the surge is receding, the level of virus remains more prevalent in Illinois than it’s been at any other time during the pandemic.
“I’m extremely confident that if everyone acted like everything were fine, prevalence, cases, hospitalizations, etc., would start climbing again, and we’d have another peak,” University of Chicago researcher Sarah Cobey wrote in an emailed response to questions about the latest trends. “There’s nothing really guaranteeing we’ll have a trough as we did early last summer, partly because it remains perennially unclear how immune the population is.”
In mid-to-late June, the state was averaging 222 new cases per day, and the average number of daily deaths was in the single digits for almost the entire month of July. Then came the successive surges driven by the delta and omicron variants, which spread more easily among the large portion of the population that remained unvaccinated and showed greater ability to infect those who were vaccinated.
In mid-October, when a late-summer surge driven by the delta variant appeared to be subsiding, Pritzker briefly raised the possibility of lifting portions of his statewide indoor mask mandate in time for the holidays. The idea was quickly dashed as hospitalizations began to rise once gain as the weather turned colder and people began spending more time indoors, the beginning of a surge that was supercharged after Thanksgiving by the arrival of omicron.
On Wednesday, Ezike said the Department of Public Health and the governor’s office were discussing the next steps in the state’s response to the coronavirus, particularly given widespread access to vaccines for people 5 and older and the anticipated increase in the availability of effective therapeutic treatments for the virus.
“Two years into the pandemic, we’ve learned so much; we’ve amassed so much knowledge,” she said. “We have to figure out how we are going to live, how we are going to coexist, with COVID.”
Still, the state also must remain prepared for the arrival of another variant that could fuel yet another surge, Ezike said.
“We’ve created an infrastructure that people can get vaccinated and boosted quite easily,” she said. “I think the other part is on the actual people, and so people have to get themselves ready just as they would for any natural disaster. And that preparation involves getting boosted and staying up to date.”
Chicago Tribune’s Alice Yin contributed.
dpetrella@chicagotribune
jmahr@chicagotribune.com
tswartz@tribpub.com
jgorner@chicagotribune.com
Biden says US weary from COVID, but nation in a better place
Jan 19, 2022
Chicago Public Schools to shorten quarantine time for students and staff as city passes omicron peak
Jan 19, 2022
Horoscopes Daily horoscope for January 20, 2022
4h
Breaking News More than 50 attorneys sign letter to Lightfoot urging her to abandon new ordinance targeting gang members
Jan 19, 2022
Business Top editorial staff leaving A.V. Club entertainment site after refusing to relocate from Chicago to new offices in LA
Jan 19, 2022