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Illinois coronavirus numbers have looked much higher over the past week, which health officials say is due to how the state is now reporting new cases and deaths.
The Illinois Department of Public Health said that last Friday, officials will “report confirmed cases and probable cases combined” under the guidance of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“A confirmed case is confirmed in the laboratory via a molecular test. A probable case meets the clinical criteria AND is epidemiologically linked, or has a positive antigen test,” the IDPH said in announcing the new cases and the change in reporting. “If a probable case is later confirmed, the case will be deduplicated and only counted once. Probable deaths and confirmed deaths will continue to be reported separately.”
Illinois began distributing rapid antigenic tests from the federal government last month, and the state’s top doctor expects more of those tests to be done “we’ll get more likely cases.”
“Now that we have obtained hundreds of thousands of tests from the federal government and are passing them on to local health departments in various places where we are testing its use, these are not counted when you test positive in that these aren’t considered confirmed cases, they’re called probable cases, ”said Dr. Ngozi Ezike, director of the Illinois Department of Public Health.“ But we’re dealing with – I mean, c ‘is positive. You have COVID if you find a positive test on this BinaxNOW test. So that’s part of our workload in terms of people who have now been diagnosed with COVID, and their contacts need to be identified and they need to isolate, etc. The total will therefore now be the combination of confirmed cases, plus probable cases. ”
“Antigen tests, especially those that the federal government has distributed to us and many other states, are a little less sensitive than PCR tests,” Illinois Governor JB Pritzker said last week. “That’s why they’re, you know, kinda, I don’t mean they’re less specific – I mean, they have a different level of sensitivity. And the bottom line is that is why they were labeled slightly differently. But if you do an antigen test, and it tests you positive, it’s very, very likely that you are positive. ”
In addition, the state has added all probable cases of the pandemic so far to its total number of cases, meaning the statewide total has increased by 7,600 in one day.
“If we go back, trying to remember the time when we didn’t have 100,000 tests a day, there was a time when we would say, if you have the symptoms, you are with someone who has. a COVID, you have a fever, you have this, you have that – you have COVID. You don’t need to take a test, in part because we don’t have access to everyone, ”Ezike said. “So people who came to the attention of the local health department were also listed as probable cases because they were linked to someone known to have it, but who did not have a confirmatory test. So those probable cases had been counted, but we never included them. Now, we report all this data for the probable cases – the antigen forms, the probable cases – and put it with our confirmed cases from the molecular test. ”
With the change, Illinois reported more than 10,000 new confirmed and probable coronavirus cases for the third day in a row Sunday, as well as 42 additional deaths.
A total of 10,009 new cases have been reported in the past 24 hours in the state, bringing the total to 487,987 during the pandemic.
The state also reported 42 additional virus-related deaths on Sunday, bringing the total number of deaths in the state to 10,196. 342 more deaths are classified as “probable” deaths from COVID-19.
Testing continues to expand in the state, with 90,757 new tests completed in the past 24 hours, according to data from the IDPH. A total of 8,404,304 tests were performed during the pandemic.
The state’s seven-day positivity rate has continued to rise in recent days, with 11.9% of total tests coming back positive in the past week, according to figures from the IDPH.
The state also saw its number of hospitalizations continue to rise on Sunday, as more than 4,300 residents are currently hospitalized with coronavirus-like illnesses. Of these patients, 833 are currently in intensive care units and 368 are on ventilators.
The three statistics are the highest metrics the state has seen in their respective categories since the first spike in COVID-19 cases earlier this year.
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