Gov. J.B. Pritzker talks about the surge in COVID-19 cases in Illinois at an unrelated news conference on Tuesday, Aug. 25, 2021. (WTTW News)
As the COVID-19 surge continues across the state and more people are hospitalized by the virus, Gov. J.B. Pritzker warned new mitigations could be on the horizon.
“We’re consistently looking at the menu of options that we may need to impose in order to bring down the numbers,” Pritzker said Tuesday at an unrelated news conference.
State health officials reported 2,989 new and confirmed probable cases of COVID-19 on Tuesday and 15 deaths. As of Monday, 2,161 people in Illinois were hospitalized with COVID-19 — 525 of them in intensive care units and 248 on ventilators, according to state data.
Pritzker said the rising number of hospitalizations in Illinois and in neighboring Kentucky, where nearly 63% of the state’s intensive care unit beds are in use, is troublesome.
“If we’re not able to bring these numbers down, if hospitals continue to fill, if hospital beds and ICUs get full like they are in Kentucky – that’s right next door to Illinois – if that happens, we’re going to have to impose significantly greater mitigations,” Pritzker said.
The governor didn’t elaborate on any possible plans, but noted that “those are things we don’t want to go back to.”
To help curb the spread of the virus, Pritzker has imposed a mask mandate for schools and state buildings and is requiring some state employees to get vaccinated against the coronavirus.
Pritzker didn’t say whether state’s vaccination mandate could be expanded to all state workers, but praised Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s comments Monday that all city workers will “absolutely” have to be vaccinated against COVID-19.
“Local leaders need to make decisions for their local populations to make sure to keep them safe, and those decisions need to be made in a serious fashion to make sure that they’re doing everything that they can to keep everybody safe,” Pritzker said. “We set a standard in the state of Illinois, a minimum, but local officials should react properly to the data in their local areas in order to keep everybody safe.”
Contact Kristen Thometz: @kristenthometz | [email protected]
