Thread by @GovPritzker

We need to re-center the conversation on what matters most: the health of our people, and the trends that are moving that health in a precarious direction.

Statewide, we have a real problem on our hands, and people’s lives hang in the balance.

We are seeing substantially more confirmed cases right now than we ever saw in the spring. Today, we are at a new high, a seven day average of 5,043 new cases per day – closing in on twice what we saw in May.

Illinois is the best testing state in the Midwest, and in Cook County alone, we produce more test results per day than 37 individual states do. But while we're able to test far more people than we did in the spring, our cases are rising at a much faster clip than our testing.

Even as our testing has grown, between late June and late July our case positivity stayed steady between 2.5-3%. From late July to a few weeks ago, it stayed below 4.5%. Today it’s up to 6.9%. Our current test positivity average, which we use for mitigation decisions, is 8.2%.

Broadly speaking, hospitalizations are a lagging indicator of rising community spread. We came into this month with an average of 1,570 patients in the hospital fighting COVID-19; today, hardly four weeks later, that average is up to 2,700 and growing.

We're seeing a similar increase in ICU admissions. On October 1st, we were averaging 360 people in the ICU statewide – today, there are over 580 in the ICU.

Let’s not forget ventilators – which is not a place that anyone ever wants to be. Too many patients who end up on a ventilator do not come back, they just don’t. Here in Illinois, similar to ICU patients, the number of patients on a ventilator is soaring – up 63% since October 1.

Tragically, we aren’t going to be able to save everyone from this pandemic. Deaths are a lagging indicator – and yet we are already seeing the consequences of rising case rates and hospitalizations across our state, and unfortunately I’m afraid we can expect much worse to come.

Well-meaning and reasonable people can have fair disagreements about how and where to draw lines and connect dots – but when every single metric in every single corner of the state is trending poorly, we have to take meaningful action to keep our people safe.