COVID-19 in Illinois updates: Here’s what’s happening this weekend

Illinois health officials on Sunday announced 1,462 new known cases of COVID-19 and 14 additional fatalities, bringing the total number of known infections in Illinois to 261,371 and the statewide death toll to 8,309.

Citywide, 84.2% of students at district schools attended a remote learning class on Tuesday, increasing to 88.5% on Wednesday and 90.2% on Thursday, according to data released Friday.

Though it would not disclose information about the patient’s illness for reasons of participant confidentiality, an AstraZeneca spokesman said earlier this week that a woman had developed severe neurological symptoms that prompted the pause in testing.

Here’s what’s happening this weekend with COVID-19 in the Chicago area and Illinois:

The morning after the world learned that a closely watched clinical trial of a coronavirus vaccine had been halted last week over safety concerns, the company’s chief executive disclosed that a person given the vaccine had experienced serious neurological symptoms.

But the remarks were not public. Instead, the chief executive, Pascal Soriot of AstraZeneca, spoke at a closed meeting organized by J.P. Morgan, the investment bank.

AstraZeneca said Saturday that an outside panel had cleared its trial in Britain to begin again, but the company still has not given any details about the patient’s medical condition, nor has it released a transcript of Soriot’s remarks to investors, which were reported by the news outlet STAT and later confirmed by an analyst for J.P. Morgan.

Another front-runner in the vaccine race, Pfizer, made a similarly terse announcement Saturday: The company is proposing to expand its clinical trial to include thousands more participants, but it gave few other details about its plan, including how it would determine the effectiveness of the vaccine in its larger study.

It is standard for drug companies to withhold details of clinical trials until after they are completed, tenaciously guarding their intellectual property and competitive edge. But these are extraordinary times, and now there is a growing outcry among independent scientists and public health experts who are pushing the companies to be far more open with the public in the midst of a pandemic that has killed more than 193,000 people in the United States.

Illinois health officials on Sunday announced 1,462 new known cases of COVID-19 and 14 additional fatalities, bringing the total number of known infections in Illinois to 261,371 and the statewide death toll to 8,309 since the start of the pandemic. Officials also reported 46,890 new tests in the last 24 hours. The seven-day statewide positivity rate is 3.7%.

Public health officials were already warning Americans about the need to prepare for the coronavirus threat in early February when President Donald Trump called it “deadly stuff” in a private conversation that has only now has come to light.

At the time, the virus was mostly a problem in China, with just 11 cases confirmed in the United States.

There was uncertainty about how the U.S. ultimately would be affected, and top U.S. officials would deliver some mixed messages along the way. But their overall thrust was to take the thing seriously.

“We’re preparing as if this is a pandemic,” Dr. Nancy Messonnier of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention told reporters on Feb. 5. “This is just good commonsense public health.”

Trump, however, had a louder megaphone than his health experts, and in public he was playing down the threat. Three days after delivering his “deadly” assessment in a private call with journalist Bob Woodward, he told a New Hampshire rally on Feb. 10, “It’s going to be fine.”

Trump’s acknowledgment in Woodward’s new book “Rage” that he was minimizing the severity of the virus in public to avoid causing panic has triggered waves of criticism that he wasn’t leveling with the American people.

One recent Sunday morning, the Rev. Manuel Dorantes stood at the altar of St. Mary of the Lake, looking out into the pews. He couldn’t see faces, only eyeballs, face masks and a mostly empty sanctuary.

But before the service began, someone from the parish’s hospitality and reopening committee made an announcement:

“To ensure the safety of everyone participating in today’s liturgy, please keep your mask or facial covering on … refrain from physical contact during the sign of peace, refrain from holding hands with individuals not in your party during the Lord’s Prayer, and receive communion with open hands.”

For at least the near future, this is the new normal for in-person worship — social distancing, face masks and sanitizing.

Illinois health officials Saturday announced 2,121 new known cases of COVID-19 and 22 additional fatalities, bringing the total number of known infections in Illinois to 259,909 and the statewide death toll to 8,295 since the start of the pandemic.

Six months after the COVID-19 pandemic first shook Chicago, the city’s once-mighty downtown — with its towering skyscrapers, glamorous shops and glittering public spaces — is a humbled giant, taking only tentative steps toward recovery.

Depressed by two waves of looting that stunned Chicago, foot traffic on and around the Magnificent Mile shopping district was less than half what it usually is. Occupancy rates for downtown apartments are the lowest they’ve been in 18 years.

As tumultuous as the last six months have been, what happens in the next six — from the presidential election to the possible development of a coronavirus vaccine — could do even more to determine whether downtown reaffirms its role as the undisputed hub of a region of nearly 9.5 million people, the largest metro area in the Midwest.

Coronavirus infections in the Dakotas are growing faster than anywhere else in the nation, fueling impassioned debates over masks and personal freedom after months in which the two states avoided the worst of the pandemic.

The argument over masks raged this week in Brookings, South Dakota, as the city council considered requiring face coverings in businesses. The city was forced to move its meeting to a local arena to accommodate intense interest, with many citizens speaking against it, before the mask requirement ultimately passed.

Amid the brute force of the pandemic, health experts warn that the infections must be contained before care systems are overwhelmed. North Dakota and South Dakota lead the country in new cases per capita over the last two weeks, ranking first and second respectively, according to Johns Hopkins University researchers.

Oxford University says trials of a coronavirus vaccine that it is developing with pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca will resume, days after being paused due to a reported side-effect in a patient in the U.K.

In a statement, the university said in large trials such as this “it is expected that some participants will become unwell and every case must be carefully evaluated to ensure careful assessment of safety.”

It said that globally some 18,000 people have received the vaccine as part of the trial.

She was known as Patient 1.

The Chicago woman in her 60s had traveled on Christmas Day to Wuhan, China, where she cared for her elderly father who had fallen ill to a mysterious, undiagnosed respiratory sickness.

After returning to Chicago in mid-January, her own symptoms emerged: fever, cough and fatigue, followed by nausea and dizziness.

While hospitalized for pneumonia, she became the first patient in Illinois and the second in the nation to test positive for the novel coronavirus, a new and little-understood illness that would soon burgeon into an international pandemic, sickening millions and altering all aspects of daily life across the globe.

Her husband, who had not gone to China, also tested positive days later, marking the first documented case of person-to-person transmission in the United States.

What medical experts learned from that local couple — through lengthy interviews, rigorous coronavirus testing and analysis of so many of their specimens — helped shape much of the nation’s earliest knowledge of the virus, which would later be called COVID-19.

The government’s top infectious disease expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, said Friday that normal times won’t replace America’s long coronavirus nightmare until deep into 2021, explaining that it will take months to widely administer a vaccine.

The 79-year-old immunologist said he continues to expect a vaccine to be available by the beginning of 2021.

“But by the time you mobilize the distribution of the vaccine and get a majority or more of the population vaccinated and protected, that’s likely not going to happen until the end of 2021,” Fauci told MSNBC. “If you’re talking about getting back to a degree of normality prior to COVID, it’s going to be well into 2021, maybe even towards the end of 2021.”