The Cook County Department of Public Health indicated that the village of Riverside has become something of a COVID-19 hotspot due to a rapid increase of new cases in the past two weeks.
The county recently has added a new data point to its online map, which tracks cases in the Chicago suburbs. The new rolling “recent percent change” overlay “is calculated by comparing counts from the past 14 days to the 14 days preceding that.”
According to that metric, Riverside saw a 133-percent increase in residents testing positive for COVID-19 compared to the two weeks preceding the period ending the morning of Aug 11.
Last week, according to the county, 14 more Riverside residents tested positive for COVID-19, bringing the village’s total up to 135. That one-week total represented the second-highest weekly increase in new cases in Riverside since the county began tracking data in March.
The previous weekly high was 15 new cases for the seven-day period ending the morning of May 12.
And the 24 new cases recorded in Riverside since July 28 falls just one short of the number of new cases the village saw during the roughly two-month period from June 2 to July 28.
Meanwhile, the rate of new COVID-19 cases in Brookfield slowed for the second straight week, with the county showing an 11-percent decline from Brookfield’s recent percent change figure over the past two weeks.
Sixteen more Brookfield residents tested positive for COVID-19 in the seven-day period ending Tuesday morning, bringing the village’s total since the start of the pandemic to 259.
North Riverside continued to see just a modest number of new cases of the disease in the past week, with three more residents testing positive, bringing the village-wide total to 93.
There were no new fatalities from COVID-19 in Riverside, North Riverside or Brookfield in the past week.
State positivity rate at 4.1%
The state announced 1,319 new confirmed cases of COVID-19 on Aug. 10 and one additional virus-related death.
That followed 1,382 cases and eight deaths reported Sunday, and 2,190 and 15 deaths reported Saturday. Low Sunday and Monday death and case counts in the state’s reported numbers have been an almost weekly trend during the pandemic, with higher numbers generally reported in the middle of the week.
The rolling positivity rate for the past seven days was 4.1 percent as of Monday after reaching 4.2 percent over the weekend. It’s the fifth straight day of a rolling positivity rate of 4 percent or higher after it was below that number for nearly two months.
There have now been 195,399 cases confirmed cases of the virus in Illinois, including 7,637 deaths since the pandemic began. More than 3.1 million test results have been reported in the state.
Jerry Nowicki of Capitol News Illinois contributed to this report.
