How We Got The Story: The evolution of our pandemic coverage

Just as the virus itself has changed over the past two and a half years, the Daily Herald's coverage of the pandemic has evolved as well.

In the early stages, new information was provided almost daily through media briefings. However, the ability to ask questions was often limited by time and distance as reporters spent months listening to Gov. J.B. Pritzker and then-Illinois Department of Public Health director Dr. Ngozi Ezike provide updates via teleconferencing, only fielding pre-written questions at the end of each briefing.

We relied on a cadre of public health and medical experts to explain the importance of certain data points and how to access reliable research. It was a crash course in epidemiology and public health policy.

But now, it's been months since Pritzker held a briefing specifically about the pandemic, while IDPH only issues weekly news releases and updates case, death and hospitalization data on weekdays.

Almost 35,000 Illinois residents have died from COVID-19 since the outset of the pandemic. The state's latest death toll figure has appeared in nearly every story published about the pandemic.

At its peak in December 2020, the state was averaging 155 deaths a day from COVID-19. Today, the state is averaging nine deaths each day from the virus.

The human toll wrought by the pandemic is one of the few constants of our coverage.

Initially, tracking the number of tests and positive cases were the main thrusts of our reporting, along with the growing mortality rates and an alarming increase of outbreaks in congregate living facilities.

For months, we kept a weekly tally of case growth in some of the larger suburbs.

Countless inches of newsprint were devoted to explaining the meaning of terms like "case positivity rate." Nowadays, IDPH doesn't even track the figure due to the prevalence of at-home testing kits.

Our coverage soon began centering on hospitalizations and ICU bed availability, watching each day as the number of patients grew and the number of unused beds shrank.

When vaccines became available, we spent weeks focused on tracking availability and monitoring the number of doses administered daily. Our coverage regularly included updates about the vaccination rates in each suburban county.

We covered mitigation strategies and updated readers when masks were required and when they weren't. Then when they were required again. And again when they weren't.

The effect of the pandemic on schools, businesses, sports, politics and almost every other imaginable facet of our lives was the subject of one or more of the stories we've produced since March 2020.

For nearly two years, there was an update every single day in the Daily Herald about the state of COVID-19 in the suburbs. We now write a weekly roundup of the latest data and developments.

And though we might not write as much about it as we once did, the pandemic remains an ever-present reminder of how rapidly our world can change.

Daily Herald projects writer Marni Pyke contributed to this report.