Today, the Center for Disease Control moved 5 Illinois counties to the “medium” risk of covid transmission. Those counties are Champaign, Logan and McLean, with DuPage and Lake in the Chicago area. Suburban Cook county also falls into the elevated category.
The CDC uses a variety of factors with which to assing risk level. This involves covid hospital admissions, percent of a given county’s inpatient beds occupied by patients receiving treatment for covid and the quantity of new cases per 100k residents in a county.
Lake County is now seeing 212 new cases per 100k residents and has a new covid hospitalization rate of 5.7 and staffed bed usage at 1.8%.
Omicron sub-lineages are increasingly more transmissible than BA.1. This represents a quantum leap in infectiousness over the original SARS-CoV-2 strain and the later delta strain.
It is important for people to stay to date with vaccination, get tested if symptomatic and isolate if positive. Regardless of the mask mandate having been removed, it is important for people to wear a high quality masks indoors. So doing is logical, sensible and easy.