COVID-19 has never been more widespread in McLean County than it is right now.
That’s one of the takeaways from the McLean County Health Department’s COVID data release on Tuesday, which covered the four-day holiday weekend. It revealed:
- A record 1,633 active cases in McLean County (residents hospitalized or isolating at home). That broke the previous record of 1,559 active cases on Nov. 16, 2020.
- 47 people hospitalized in Bloomington-Normal’s two hospitals – which say they’re at capacity – and 31 McLean County residents hospitalized overall.
- Testing positivity rate of 11.4%. That’s the highest it’s been since Dec. 2, 2020.
McLean County’s previous worst COVID spike came in November and December 2020. That was before the COVID vaccine. It’s now widely available, although only 58.1% of McLean County residents are now fully vaccinated. Only 29% of children ages 5 to 11 in McLean County have received their first dose since it became available to them in early November.
Another difference between the 2021 and 2020 spikes is that the current surge is putting even more pressure on Bloomington-Normal’s two hospitals. During the previous spike in mid-November 2020, only about 75% of hospital beds (including ICU beds) were in use. Today, 92% of ICU beds are in use, and 94% of beds overall.
The vast majority of hospitalized COVID patients are unvaccinated. Hospital leaders have pleaded with people to get vaccinated and said they fear those pleas have now become unwelcome “white noise.”
One cause for concern is that hospitalizations and deaths are typically lagging indicators, trailing case counts. That suggests hospitalizations and deaths could jump in the weeks ahead. No new deaths have been reported since before Christmas.
And more cases could be identified soon. The community-based testing site at Bloomington’s Interstate Center tested 816 people on Monday. That’s the highest number tested there on a single day since November 2020, according to Pekin-based Reditus Labs, which runs the site.
Reditus says it’s still averaging 24 to 48 hours for results “despite the dramatic increase in testing demands.” (Tell WGLT about your testing experience in Bloomington-Normal.)
The Interstate Center testing site is open 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Saturday, though it’s closed on New Year’s Day. More testing options are available on the MCHD website, although SHIELD testing sites at Illinois State University and Heartland Community College don’t reopen until Jan. 3.
The CDC on Tuesday said it estimates the omicron variant accounted for about 58.6% of U.S. cases as of Dec. 25. It’s unclear how widespread it is in central Illinois.
One reason is that Reditus has been unable to run its normal sequencing tests on samples from the Bloomington site. The re-agent substance needed to do the COVID-19 sequencing to identify variants is backlogged, so Reditus says it’s not been able to do a sequencing run since Dec. 5. It plans to resume processing variant sequencing Jan. 7.
Omicron is so much more transmissible than coronavirus variants that have come before it. It spreads at least three times faster than delta.
Vaccines are widely available in Bloomington-Normal. That includes two health department vaccine clinics on Wednesday and Thursday at Grossinger Motors Arena in Bloomington.
