Illinois has passed another milestone in testing for the new coronavirus, for the first time conducting more than 20,000 screenings in a single day, Gov. J.B. Pritzker said Friday.
Expanded testing is a cornerstone of Pritzker’s five-phase plan for reopening the state, but a study released this week suggests Illinois is still a long way from doing enough to safely relax the governor’s stay-at-home order. And Pritzker himself has said the state needs to test even more than the study from Harvard University suggests.
“Testing is fundamental to our ability to reopen the economy while controlling the spread of the virus,” the governor at his daily news briefing. “That’s what it takes to keep the public safe.
“The progress we’ve made on testing over the last two months — building a statewide testing program from scratch, to around 15,000 to 20,000 tests per day — is tremendous. Even if we’re one of the best states in the nation on testing, we know it’s not enough to be where we need to be on a longer time frame.”
In March, Pritzker set a goal of conducting 10,000 tests per day, a benchmark it took nearly a month to achieve as Illinois, like other states, struggled with supply shortages and other roadblocks. The state finally surpassed that goal on April 24 and since has been averaging about 15,000 daily screenings.
Officials said Friday that 20,671 specimens were tested in the previous 24 hour, for a total of 399,714 since the outbreak began.
The state also announced 2,887 new known cases of COVID-19, along with 130 more fatalities. That brings the total count of known cases to 73,760 and the death toll to 3,241 statewide since the start of the outbreak.
The state averaged 113 deaths per day for the week ending Friday, compared with 96 for the previous seven days.
Under the “Restore Illinois” reopening road map Pritzker released Tuesday, the positivity rate in any of the plan’s four regions must be at or under 20% and increase no more than 10 percentage points over a 14-day period, among other criteria, in order to move to the next phase.
According to a recent analysis conducted by Harvard and the STAT online medical publication, Illinois would have to conduct more than 64,000 tests every day before it should further relax its stay-at-home order.
By that measure, Illinois falls far short. The state has averaged 16,432 tests a day for the week ending Friday.
Illinois is not alone, the analysis found. Dozens of states are falling well short of what’s needed, with estimates based on the number of detected cases so far and the population of each state. New York, for example, is conducting about 22,000 tests a day but should be doing nearly 113,000.
Pritzker acknowledged Thursday that the state still needs to conduct many more tests per day before it will be safe to fully reopen the economy.
“Every state in the country, let’s be clear, is trying to ramp up testing,” Pritzker said when asked about the Harvard study at his daily news briefing. “We’re doing it better than most; indeed, we’re No. 2 among the top 10 most populous states in the nation.”
However, he added, “We’re all trying to get to a sense of adequacy. I don’t think 64,000 is adequate for the state of Illinois. I think we’re going to need many more tests than that.
“We want people to be safe when they go to work; we want people to be safe when they go to school. We want people to be safe in all their activities, and they want to know that others have been tested around them so that nobody is without an opportunity to get a test.”
Illinois and other states have been navigating a worldwide shortage of testing supplies and a lack of coordination on the federal level, Pritzker said, adding that he’s grateful that Washington is now sending more testing supplies to Illinois.
Pritzker said the first shipment of supplies pledged by the Trump administration — which includes 620,000 swabs — was scheduled to arrive the first week of the month but has been delayed until Sunday.
Despite the delay, the state continues to expand its testing efforts as it moves toward a phased reopening, Pritzker said.
The state will be setting up three new drive-thru COVID-19 testing sites next week and will be announcing their locations “in the coming days.” Illinois is currently operating seven of these drive-up testing sites statewide.
There are 244 public testing locations in Illinois, with 52 sites in Chicago, 26 sites in the southwest suburbs, nine sites in the west suburbs, 20 sites in the northwest suburbs and 20 sites in the north suburbs.
Chicago Tribune’s Hal Dardick and Angie Leventis Lourgos contributed.
dpetrella@chicagotribune.com
