Illinois may be starting to bend the curve on the number of cases of COVID-19. Governor J.B. Pritzker said yesterday that the percent of positive cases of those tested came up almost exactly the same as it has been the last weeks and the death toll yesterday was lower than it had been in six days. IDPH announced 1672 new cases and 43 additional deaths yesterday. Pritzker says he’s going to keep looking at numbers and talking to medical experts. “You don’t really know until you start going down, you know whether you’ve peaked. And what I look for is a leveling because the numbers had been going up exponentially. And then they were going up arithmetically. And you’ll see this number today is higher than other numbers, it may be our highest number yet, but we also tested more than ever before and that’s how you end up with a higher number.”
Pritzker says he doesn’t know what the state will look like once the state opens back up. “So the question is how do you operate society when we begin to bring down the level of infection and make sure that people are able to begin to go back to work in various industries. So I’m talking to industry leaders about that. I’m talking to economists about that. I’m also, very importantly, listening to the scientists and the doctors to make sure that we do this right because what we don’t want, the last thing we want is to begin to open things up and then have a big spike in infections. And then and you know unfortunately all the spikes that come with that including a spike in deaths. So we want to make sure we’re not doing that while we’re also looking at how we can get people back to work.”
Pritzker says he’s glad that the state is finally getting closer to his goal of 10,000 tests per day. Yesterday, Illinois had tested over 7900 people in a 24 hour period. Locally, numbers all stayed the same with no further positive cases to report in Morgan County or the surrounding area. Pritzker and Illinois Department of Public Health Director Dr. Ngozi Ezike echoed the idea of staying the course on social distancing and staying at home.