Suburban Cook County will join the rest of the state outside Chicago in expanding coronavirus vaccine eligibility Monday to everyone 16 and older as the state makes 150,000 appointments for first doses available next week at mass vaccination sites and pharmacies in the suburbs.
Most of Illinois’ 101 other counties already have expanded eligibility to everyone old enough to receive the vaccine, but the city of Chicago, which gets its own supply from the federal government, isn’t following suit until April 19, the most recent deadline President Joe Biden set for universal adult eligibility.
The wider effort comes as the state continues to see a third surge of COVID-19 and races to vaccinate people as quickly as possible in an effort to slow the spread of variants of the virus that are believed to be more transmissible.
Just three weeks after Gov. J.B. Pritzker outlined his plan for eventually lifting all coronavirus-related restrictions, some of the experts who have advised his administration instead are suggesting it’s time for rules be tightened once again.
“I’m just kind of perplexed that there isn’t more urgency about this, and maybe the expectation is that vaccination is going to save our butts,” said Jaline Gerardin, an assistant professor of preventive medicine at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine who is among those who have been modeling the state’s coronavirus data since early in the pandemic.
Cook County officials also have warned in recent days that restrictions such as a ban on indoor service at restaurants and bars could return if recent trends continue.
“We need to continue to make progress in vaccinating our residents, but if we have trends in the wrong direction, we’ll not hesitate to tighten restrictions on gatherings indoors or outdoors,” Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle said Thursday at a news conference with Pritzker at a Forest Park mass vaccination site.
State officials so far have not issued such strong warnings, even as Illinois over the past week has recorded daily cases and other measures of virus transmission that haven’t been seen since midwinter, when the state still was descending from the massive fall and early winter surge.
“We have a vaccine, and we are elated about that,” Dr. Ngozi Ezike, director of the Illinois Department of Public Health, said Thursday. “But it doesn’t mean this pandemic is completely over. We do need to continue to wear our masks before we can return to what we were doing pre-pandemic in the way we did it pre-pandemic.”
Some of the newest batch of vaccination appointments were available as early as Thursday, with more opening up in coming days, according to the governor’s office. Cook County plans to post available appointments at noon Friday for state-supported vaccination sites in Forest Park, Tinley Park, at Triton College in River Grove and South Suburban College in South Holland.
Pritzker said Chicago residents are “absolutely welcome” to sign up for appointments at the state-run mass vaccination sites. He also urged the public to continue being patient in trying to schedule an appointment.
“Even with all of these new appointments, there will not be enough vaccine in week one to get everyone that wants to be vaccinated a dose,” he said.
In all, the state will deliver roughly 250,000 vaccine doses to mass vaccination sites and pharmacies in suburban Cook and the collar counties next week, on top of tens of thousands of doses being administered at hospitals, local vaccination sites and other locations.
A record 154,201 coronavirus vaccine doses were administered statewide Wednesday, bringing the total to 6,707,183, public health officials reported. Over the last seven days, an average of 112,680 vaccinations were administered daily.
The number of residents who have been fully vaccinated — receiving both of the required Pfizer or Moderna shots, or Johnson & Johnson’s single shot — reached 2,571,654, or 20.18% of the total population. As of Thursday, 42.37% of residents 16 and older have received at least one dose of a coronavirus vaccine.
Officials on Thursday reported 3,739 new confirmed and probable cases of COVID-19. That brought the average number of new daily cases over the past week to 3,012 — the highest level since the week ending Feb. 4. A month ago, the state was averaging 1,668 cases per day.
The statewide case positivity rate — the percentage of cases as a share of total tests — reached a seven-day average of 4.2% for the week ending Wednesday, up from 3.5% the previous week and 2.3% a month ago. It’s the highest case positivity rate since late January.
Officials also reported 34 additional fatalities Thursday, contributing to a statewide death toll of 21,457. The total number of known infections in Illinois since the start of the pandemic is 1,269,196.
In Chicago, the city’s vaccine supply was set back by more than 35,000 doses because of the spoilage of Johnson & Johnson vaccines at a facility in Baltimore, public health Commissioner Dr. Allison Arwady said Thursday during a separate event.
Not including direct federal shipments to pharmacies and clinics, Arwady said first dose shipments to Chicago declined from 105,040 last week to 69,940 and likely won’t pick up until the end of the month because Johnson & Johnson can’t catch up from its loss of 15 million doses, and Pfizer and Moderna vaccine supplies are projected to stay flat.
Arwady said the city has been pushing federal and state officials to ship vaccines that are going unused elsewhere in Illinois to the Chicago area because up there “the supply is just not meeting the demand yet.”
“I’m hopeful that it may come through, but we’ve not had any indication that it will at this point,” Arwady said about pleas for increased shipments.
Pritzker downplayed the significance of the Johnson & Johnson problem to the state’s vaccine supply.
“Yes, 15 million doses being lost is a big deal, but at the same time, millions more doses are being added every week to what’s being distributed to the state of Illinois and to the rest of the country, so I feel good about the trajectory here,” Pritzker said.
Arwady encouraged Chicagoans to look for appointments outside the city, including downstate Illinois or Indiana, where there was “softer” demand. Chicago residents are eligible for vaccine appointments in both of those areas, she said.
“I want to express that I am frustrated that Chicago residents would need to leave Chicago to get vaccinated, but on the other hand, if you have the means to do that … Indiana has got plenty of vaccine and not enough people taking it,” she said.
Earlier this year, Arwady said the city would crack down on collar county residents who do not work in Chicago flooding the city for vaccine appointments, arguing that was an unfair use of doses allocated to the city based on its population.
While the third surge presents a concern for the next few weeks, Arwady predicted that the city would be “in good shape” by May. But there still could be tougher restrictions imposed this month.
“We cannot be letting down our guard yet,” Arwady said. “At an individual level, it is high risk right now to be out and about and gathering in Chicago.”
The metrics the city would use to determine additional mitigations have evolved from last fall’s shutdown of indoor dining because vaccinations have begun, the hospital system is not at risk of being overwhelmed and most of the demographics driving the surge have not had the most severe outcomes, she said.
“Why are these cases on the rise?” Arwady said. “Honestly, they’re on the rise because people are feeling like we’re done with COVID and they are just staying home a lot less.”
A state Department of Public Health spokeswoman said Wednesday that the agency is “closely monitoring the metrics and evaluating how increasing vaccination rates will impact the need for further mitigation if numbers don’t improve.” She did not respond to a request for comment on whether the previous rules for triggering tighter restrictions on a regional basis remain in effect.
As of Wednesday night, 1,798 people in Illinois were hospitalized with COVID-19, with 351 patients in intensive care units and 151 patients on ventilators. The seven-day average of total hospitalizations is 1,586, the highest since an average of 1,603 was recorded Feb. 21.
Rising hospitalizations are just the “tippy-top” of the iceberg when it comes to measuring the transmission of the coronavirus, said Northwestern’s Gerardin. Of particular concern is that hospitalizations are on the rise even though the vaccination effort has prioritized older residents who are most likely to end up needing care for COVID-19, she said.
Officials should be looking at shutting down activities, such as indoor dining, that are known to be high risk, said Geradin, who has been joined by experts at the University of Chicago, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Argonne National Laboratory in modeling the state’s coronavirus data.
The most recent projections suggest that even with increasing vaccination rates, the state won’t turn the corner until late May, possibly resulting in another 2,500 coronavirus deaths by June.
The benefits of vaccination take time to manifest, said Phil Arevalo, a U. of C. researcher who is part of the modeling group. In the meantime, he said, cases, hospitalizations and positivity rates are continuing to rise in tandem, suggesting additional measures are needed to slow the spread.
“That’s when you have a pretty robust signal that something needs to change,” Arevalo said.
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