The JB Pritzker government on Thursday morning is expected to announce a state indoor mask warrant for all over 2s and a vaccine warrant for all preschool employees up to 12th grade and higher education to reduce the spread of COVID-19, sources in the Daily Herald reported. .
The move would come after Pritzker warned on Tuesday of “significantly greater mitigations” if hospitalizations continue to rise. The governor wondered about extending a vaccination warrant to all state workers instead of a smaller group of employees working in congregated places, such as veterans ’homes, on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, but avoided a direct response.
“If hospitals continue to fill up, if that happens, we will have to impose significantly greater mitigations,” Pritzker said Tuesday in Chicago. “These are menu items we don’t want to go back to.”
On Wednesday, the governor said he was considering several options to keep hospitalizations low.
The news comes when deaths related to advanced cases of COVID-19 increased by 30 people in a week, with most people over 65 or with underlying medical conditions, data from the Department of Public Health on Wednesday showed. Illinois.
This brings the total number of vaccinated Illinoisans who succumbed to the respiratory virus to 253 out of a total of 7,326 deaths since Jan. 1, or about 3.5%.
Of the 253 people who died, about 61% were immunocompromised or had an underlying disease, such as cancer, and 89% were 65 or older, IDPH reported.
Medical experts stressed that the vast majority of severe cases of COVID-19 treating in hospitals involve unvaccinated people.
On Wednesday, the City of Chicago and Northwestern Medicine joined mandatory vaccinations for employees in an effort to stop the spread of the disease.
“In the ICU we are seeing a good number of cases and virtually everyone who comes to the ICU who has COVID-19 pneumonia is not vaccinated,” said Dr. Jeff Huml, medical director of critical care at Northwestern Medicine Hospital Central DuPage of Winfield.
“The pandemic is fast becoming a critical disease for the unvaccinated. People have free will and choice, but I would like to choose to follow science,” Huml said.
A total of 1,190 vaccinated people have been hospitalized with COVID-19 since Jan. 1, or less than 1 percent of Illinois residents who have been inoculated, IDPH reported.
“The vaccine continues to do what we really hoped it would do in the beginning, which keeps us from getting really sick,” said Dr. Michael Bauer, director of Northwestern Lake Forest Hospital. “It’s doing very well. But we’re seeing that you can still have a COVID-19 infection despite being vaccinated.”
New COVID-19 cases totaled 4,451 on Wednesday, above the seven-day average of 3,534, with 40 more deaths from respiratory disease, the Illinois Department of Public Health reported. The average of seven days of deaths is about 19 per day.
On Tuesday, 28,624 more shots were fired from COVID-19. The seven-day average is 24,196.
In Chicago, Mayor Lori Lightfoot said all city employees should be fully vaccinated on Oct. 15 and Northwestern Medicine announced a similar requirement by Oct. 31.
“Given the spread of the delta variant of COVID-19 and its risk to those with underlying diseases and children under 12 who are not yet eligible to receive a vaccine, doctors and Northwestern Medical staff they will have to complete vaccination against COVID-19 ”. Said communications director Christopher King.
Both entities said workers would be allowed to apply for a medical or religious exemption. At Northwestern, non-compliant employees will be required to take weekly COVID-19 tests, and on January 1, vaccination will become a working condition.
Other hospital groups that require vaccines include Edward-Elmhurst Health, Advocate Aurora, Loyola Medicine, University of Chicago Medicine, University of Illinois Health, Cook County Health and Rush Health.
The federal government has administered 16,000,255 doses of vaccine in Illinois since distribution began in mid-December and 13,861,875 shots have been administered.
To date, 6,719,139 Illinois residents have been completely vaccinated, 52.7% of the state’s 12.7 million population. Pfizer and Moderna vaccines require two separate doses several weeks.
Illinois hospitals treated 2,197 patients with COVID-19 Tuesday night.
The state positivity rate for COVID-19 cases is 5.1% based on a seven-day average.
The total number of cases statewide is 1,499,022 and 23,816 Illinois residents have died since the pandemic began.
Laboratories processed 78,206 virus tests in the last 24 hours.
Daily Herald reporter Jake Griffin contributed to this report.