Coronavirus Positivity Rate On The Rise In Kendall County: IDPH

KENDALL COUNTY, IL — County health officials are asking residents to do their part in containing the spread of COVID-19 as the regional positivity rate continues to rise.

The Kendall County Health Department wrote in a release on Wednesday that the testing positivity rate for Illinois' North Central region – which Kendall County is part of – had increased every day for the last several days and was at about 4 percent as of July 29, according to public health data.

This comes just over two weeks after Gov. J.B. Pritzker announced a new mitigation plan that divided the state into 11 regions. The administration uses indicators including positivity rates, hospital admissions, new cases, clusters and deaths to assess the level of COVID-19 activity in each region.

Any region that sustains an 8 percent positivity rate for three days in a row or sees an increase in positivity rates and simultaneous decrease in hospital capacity will need to implement additional community mitigation interventions, the Illinois Department of Public Health website states.

"Interventions in the region will be chosen from a tiered 'menu’ of options based on the severity and potential cause of the resurgence," county health officials wrote.

Those measures could include restricting the size of social gatherings, reducing capacity at businesses or scaling back operations in industries that pose a higher risk of transmission, like indoor dining, bars, salons or personal care services.

According to IDPH, the target is to have less than 50 new cases per 100,000 people in a week. However, as of July 25, there were 66 cases, leading state health officials to issue a warning.

Kendall County is now part of the North-Central Region that includes the following counties: Bureau, Fulton, Grundy, Henderson, Henry, Kendall, Knox, La Salle, Livingston, Marshall, McDonough, McLean, Mercer, Peoria, Putnam, Rock Island, Stark, Tazewell, Warren, and Woodford.

Initially, the state was divided into only four regions and the Northeast Region included Cook, Lake, McHenry, DuPage, Kane, Kendall, Will, Grundy and Kankakee counties. This prompted a lot of backlash from the suburban communities that felt they should be separated from Chicago in terms of deciding when to reopen because cases there were not as high as in the city.

But now, there has been an increase, and while Chicago has a positivity rate of 4.5 percent as of July 25, Kendall County had the highest in the area with 6.8 percent, as per IDPH data. The positivity rate has steadily increased for the past eight days in the North-Central Region and was at 4.8 percent as of Thursday.

County health officials said "our success in slowing the spread of COVID-19 relies heavily on our residents wearing masks, washing hands, and watching our distance from others."

Kendall County currently has 1,329 cases with 879 in recovery and 24 deaths. The latest coronavirus-induced death was reported on Thursday. According to a release from the Kendall County Health Department, the deceased was a female in her 50s "that suffered from additional health complexities."

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