COVID-19 has now claimed the lines of over 3,000 U.S. citizens.
That number comes from John Hopkins University Tuesday morning surpassed the total of the 2,977 victims killed in the September 11th terrorist attacks across America in 2001. Illinois now stands at 73 total deaths, 44 in Cook County alone.
Last night, IDPH Director Dr. Ngozi Ezike announced 461 new cases of COVID-19 in Illinois, a far lower count than Sunday’s over 1,000 new cases. But Dr. Ezike warns residents not to pay attention to a slight dip in results after just one day, but rather look to the trends.
“There’s a lot of data we’re looking at. You can’t look at data day-to-day. You have to look over trends.” said Dr. Ezike. “Looking at day’s trends, weeks trends gives you a lot more information. It’s very hard to decipher hour-to-hour or day-to-day trends. We know we’re still in an exponential growth phase and so we will continue to see increasing numbers. And yet, despite that, we know that does not represent all the cases that we have in Illinois.
Dr. Ezike added most commercial labs take 4-7 days to get in test results, and if those results aren’t submitted by the State’s 10:00 deadline, they tend to curb the numbers at first glance.
Attention has been brought across many in Social Media as to why the results of those ‘recovered’ from COVID-19 have yet to be highlighted. Governor Pritzker shed light on that at Yesterday’s news conference saying they’re just hard to track down.
“There are some areas, cities or other states that have reported a recovered number. Those are difficult numbers actually to obtain.” Governor Pritzker said on Monday, “Think about yourself if you got the flu and you maybe saw your doctor and then you went home, and you were, at home and you were recovered. You don’t call your doctor at the end of your recovery and say ‘I’m recovered now.’”
“We are working with the County Health Officials all across the State to get that data.” Governor Pritzker assured.
