Vaccinated People Make Up 33% Of Recent COVID-19 Cases In Skokie

SKOKIE, IL — With more than five out of six Skokie residents aged 12 and older having received at least one dose of a coronavirus vaccine, and nearly eight of 10 fully vaccinated, an increasing share of the village's new COVID-19 infections are occurring among those already inoculated.

Mike Charley, the village's health and human services director, said only about 5 percent of people testing positive for the coronavirus in the spring were vaccinated, but that share has steadily risen to 33 percent of new cases.

"Since April 26, we've had 459 cases of COVID. Seventy-one, or about 15 percent of those cases, have been cases of those who have been fully vaccinated, and that's what's considered a breakthrough case," Charley told trustees Monday. "Out of the 71 breakthrough cases, zero of those cases required hospitalization. Zero of those cases died."

The health director emphasized that vaccines have demonstrated their effectiveness at significantly reducing the risk of severe illness and death from COVID-19.

"I think that should be reason enough," Charley said. "Even if you don't believe that it's going to protect you 100 percent, I think if you get it, you're going to be happy that you're not hospitalized."

Among the village's breakthrough cases, 79 percent had gotten the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, while 27 percent had the vaccine produced by Moderna. About 50 percent of doses administered to Skokie residents were Pfizer vaccines and 46 percent were Moderna — indicating there is a greater risk of a breakthrough infection, at least in Skokie, after receiving the Pfizer vaccine, according to the health director.

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Charley said the rising numbers of breakthrough cases are likely linked to the spread of variants of concern, such as the delta variant, which is believed to be twice as contagious as the original virus.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention classifies variants in one of four categories: variants of interest, variants of concern and variants of consequence.

"Despite what the media has told you, the CDC hasn't defined any one of our individual variants as being the top tier yet, as being a really significant risk to the public," Charley said. "But there are four variants of concern, and a variant of concern is a variant for which there is evidence of an increased transmissibility, more severe disease, significant reduction in neutralization by antibodies generated during previous infection or vaccination, a reduced effectiveness of treatments or vaccines or diagnostic detection failures."

Now that the delta variant makes up most new infections, he said, the average number of new cases every day in the village has risen from one to six and a half. And with Illinois in Phase 5 of Gov. J.B. Pritzker's Restore Illinois COVID-19 reopening plan, all mitigation measures, like masking and social distancing, are currently voluntary. But because Skokie has a state-certified health department, village officials could issue mandatory public health orders in the future.

"Right now, there is no governor's order with COVID-19. It's all recommendations. So we can't go out to an individual business or an organization and say, 'You must mask,' or, 'You must limit your facility to less than 10 people per square foot,' or whatever — not, at least, through a state order. We do have the authority as a state health department to draft our own orders if we needed to, and if we needed to do that we could," Charley said.

"Businesses and organizations, special event organizers, also have the right to impose their own restrictions with their own businesses," he added. "So if a business only wanted to let 10 people in at a time, they can do that. If they want to require masking, they can do that."