Illinois COVID hospitalizations up 20% from week ago

State health officials Tuesday reported 3,628 COVID-19 patients were being treated at hospitals throughout Illinois.

That's up 20% from a week ago and is 115 more patients from just one day before.

Of those hospitalized, 743 are in intensive care, according to Illinois Department of Public Health records.

Statewide, IDPH figures show just 327 of the 3,030 staffed ICU beds in Illinois are available, or 10.8%.

Only seven of the ICU beds staffed in hospitals located in Will and Kankakee counties were available Tuesday, IDPH data showed. That's less than 6%.

In suburban Cook County, less than 10% of ICU beds are available.

At hospitals in Lake and McHenry counties, IDPH figures show 11% of ICU beds are open.

And even though hospitals in DuPage and Kane counties are faring better than their suburban counterparts in terms of ICU bed availability, with 16% open, health officials are warning that hospitals are at risk of becoming overwhelmed by COVID-19 patients.

“We were on a call with hospital leaders this morning,” said DuPage County Health Department Executive Director Karen Ayala. “They're identifying that they're seeing ... a doubling over the last two weeks, a quadrupling over the last four weeks in their hospital admissions.”

Edward-Elmhurst Health is reporting a combined 96 COVID-19 patients at their Naperville and Elmhurst hospitals, 26% more than just one week ago.

IDPH officials are also reporting 28 more residents have died of COVID-19, while 7,390 new cases of the respiratory disease were diagnosed.

That brings the state's death toll from the virus to 26,934, and 1,911,649 infections have been recorded since the outset of the pandemic, IDPH records show.

The state's seven-day case positivity rate is at 4%, the same as the day before. Case positivity is the percentage of new cases derived from a batch of tests. A seven-day average is used to account for any anomalies in the daily reporting of those figures.

Meanwhile, IDPH officials reported 69,895 more COVID-19 vaccine doses have been administered statewide.

Since the vaccines became available late last year, 18,251,052 doses have been administered, including 2,460,294 booster doses.

According to IDPH figures, 59.5% of the state's 12.7 million residents are fully vaccinated.

• Daily Herald staff writer Katlyn Smith contributed to this report.