Coronavirus Deaths Top 500 In Kane County With 5 More Tuesday

KANE COUNTY, IL — Public health officials are starting to roll out the coronavirus vaccine to health care workers throughout the U.S., but for more than 500 Kane County residents, the vaccine did not come soon enough.

December is on pace to be Kane County’s deadliest month of the pandemic, with officials reporting 66 COVID-19 deaths during the first two weeks of the month.

May is the county’s deadliest month of the pandemic, with 123 deaths from coronavirus-related conditions, according to statistics from the Illinois Department of Public Health.

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Kane County has experienced a significant surge in coronavirus-related deaths since mid-November, though the number of deaths dropped slightly over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend.

Seventy-eight Kane County residents died from COVID-19 in November, according to statistics from the Illinois Department of Public Health. The county's previous 78 coronavirus-related deaths were recorded over a period of nearly four months (July 3-Oct. 31).

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Kane County's seven-day rolling average of deaths — a measure that takes into account daily fluctuations to show longer-term trends — hit 5.5 on Tuesday, the highest it has been in nearly seven months, the state’s data shows.

Kane County's death toll topped 500 on Tuesday after officials reported five new deaths. Nearly 54 percent of the county's 504 deaths were linked to long-term-care facilities.

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A second wave of the pandemic appears to be subsiding in the county after new cases hit record levels in November. In the first two weeks of December, officials reported 5,206 new coronavirus cases in Kane County, which is down 11 percent from the 5,850 cases reported over the previous two weeks.

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Kane County's seven-day average of new cases hit its highest point of the pandemic Nov. 12 — at 595 cases — before falling to about 342 by the end of November.

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The county’s average rose to about 414 cases by Dec. 7, before falling to about 330 on Monday. That’s the lowest it’s been Nov. 4.

All 11 coronavirus-management regions in Illinois are under Tier 3 restrictions, which require some non-essential businesses to close and many stores to enforce capacity limits, in addition to indoor-service bans at bars and restaurants.

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A region can move back to Tier 2 mitigations if its positivity rate drops below 12 percent for three consecutive days, if it has more than 20 percent of hospital beds open, and if it sees a sustained drop in hospitalizations for coronavirus-related illnesses.

The positivity rate in Region 8 dropped from an all-time high of 16 percent on Nov. 13 to 11.6 percent Dec. 12, the most recent day for which testing data is available.

Kane County's positivity rate is down from 18.4 percent to 12.7 percent over the same period, public health data shows.

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