State of Illinois Vaccine Plans: As state and local public health officials plan for the arrival of a COVID-19 vaccine, CICI wanted to notify the membership again about the state’s vaccine plan.  An FDA review committee is scheduled to meet tomorrow to decide whether to grant an Emergency Use Authorization to release a vaccine.  Assuming the FDA grants this authorization, the first shipment could arrive in Illinois next week.

The state’s vaccine plan outlines three priority groups: critical health care workers, staff and residents in long-term facilities and workforce members who provide “essential functions of society.” The definition of essential workers is broad, and includes people working in manufacturing, transportation and food and agriculture.

Front-line health care workers and nursing home residents are scheduled to be offered the vaccine first, followed by “essential workers”, people over 65, and those with higher risk of COVID-19-related medical complications. For now, it’s likely that only people 18 and older will be offered the vaccine because it hasn’t been tested on children yet.  Public health officials claim it will take months to roll out the vaccine to priority groups and even longer for the general public because of limited supplies.

Chemicals as part of manufacturing is in the third priority group after health care and nursing home residents. All other folks in Illinois will be in line for vaccinations after those three priority groups.

The city of Chicago will get vaccines allocated directly from the federal government. The rest of the state will have a separate allotment.  According to press reports, the city expects to receive 23,000 doses of Pfizer’s vaccine in its initial batch and receive additional doses each subsequent week.  However, it will be several weeks before Chicago’s estimated 400,000 health care workers are fully vaccinated, which will require 800,000 doses. City officials will allocate those first doses to all 34 acute and specialty hospitals in the city.

You can use this calculator and this vaccine tool, to determine the number of people who will need a vaccine in each state and county and where certain individuals might fit in that line.   

The vaccine appears to be effective in 95 percent of the people who receive it, and in 94 percent of people over age 65.  However, it is crucial that people continue to follow public health mitigations to suppress the spread of the virus until vaccines are ready for widespread distribution.

Update on COVID-19 Cases: IDPH is reporting 812,430 positive tests of COVID-19 in Illinois, an average increase of 8,468 new positive tests per day since reported here 5 days ago on December 4.  In total, 11,367,345 tests have now been conducted in Illinois for the virus, an average increase of 89,669 tests per day since December 4. 

The state’s average positivity rate over all 11 regions is at 9.6% for the last 7 days, but 9.4% in the last 5 days. This is the first time that the positivity rate has been below 10% since November 6.  You can see where the various regions are at in terms of their positivity rates, hospitalizations and other metrics at this link. 

Unfortunately, IDPH is reporting a total of 13,666 deaths, an average increase of 138 per day since December 4.

You can also check where these cases are occurring at the State of Illinois COVID-19 website which also contains more information on this outbreak.

Also, IDPH has a case breakdown of the number of positive cases in Chicago and each county relative to the number of fatalities.  The IDPH website also now includes a breakdown of the cases under each zip code in the state.

For information on other states and countries, John Hopkins University has developed this website that provides invaluable resources at a one-stop location detailing testing and tracing trends, timelines of COVID-19 policies, and interactive maps.

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