14 Comments - Hot Taeks - Wednesday, Aug 19, 20 @ 12:15 pm: *Face Palm* Not good. Not good at all. - Banish Misfortune - Wednesday, Aug 19, 20 @ 12:18 pm: Clicked through the various regions, thinking surely “my” area is better. Sadly no. Come on - do better Illinois! - illinifan - Wednesday, Aug 19, 20 @ 12:23 pm: Gasped when I read the numbers. Not good at all. And there is no willingness to step back to another phase. Doubt if the Illinois economy can sustain a step back. I am afraid this is the best it will be. - Wensicia - Wednesday, Aug 19, 20 @ 12:33 pm: If you think it’s bad now, as many schools and college campuses are opening, these numbers will only get worse. - Chicago Cynic - Wednesday, Aug 19, 20 @ 12:57 pm: Damn. - Archie Dbunker - Wednesday, Aug 19, 20 @ 1:05 pm: “So to start, it is very remarkable that Kary Mullis himself, the inventor of the Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) technology, did not think alike. His invention got him the Nobel prize in chemistry in 1993. Unfortunately, Mullis passed away last year at the age of 74, but there is no doubt that the biochemist regarded the PCR as inappropriate to detect a viral infection. The reason is that the intended use of the PCR was, and still is, to apply it as a manufacturing technique, being able to replicate DNA sequences millions and billions of times, and not as a diagnostic tool to detect viruses.” - Montrose - Wednesday, Aug 19, 20 @ 1:22 pm: I may have frustrations with remote learning, but I am still very glad our son started school today from the safety of his bedroom. - Six Degrees of Separation - Wednesday, Aug 19, 20 @ 1:36 pm: Checking all the regions, aside from the obvious issues in District 4 Metro East, the other regions that look to be of near-term concern are- District 10 Suburban Cook - 6.4% positivity and rising District 7 Kankakee-Will - 7.2% positivity and rising District 5 SO IL - 7.1% positivity and declining District 3 west central IL - 6.1% positivity and holding - What's the plan here? - Wednesday, Aug 19, 20 @ 1:47 pm: 100 percent aware that there is indeed a plan in place…but it seems as though things are already getting bad and I don’t see how the state is doing everything to make it better. You can tell people to stay safe, wear masks, etc. but it’s becoming pretty clear they aren’t willing to do that. Does anyone else feel that the 8 percent threshold is a little too high? I’m a worrier– but at what point do we realize this isn’t getting better and will likely only get worse especially with Fall approaching? - cermak_rd - Wednesday, Aug 19, 20 @ 2:17 pm: I don’t know what more the state can do. It doesn’t allow large gatherings (other than churches and most of responsible ones of those are having social distancing or Zoom services), it only allows a certain amount of indoor dining. It recently gave businesses the responsibility of ensuring on-premise masking. They have educated people on what to do to minimize spread. The state can’t stop people having private parties. It can’t stop people from being covidiots. And anything it tries to do will be met with resistance from the covidiot regions of the state. - all luck - Wednesday, Aug 19, 20 @ 2:40 pm: Region 6 really seems like it needs to be split into non-Champaign and Champaign. Coles (2nd) Effingham (3rd) and Moultrie (5th) are among the highest per capita positive cases in state over last week with not great positivity rates but Champaign is testing so many more tests than rest of counties combined that Coles and the rest of the counties would have to turn into peak Florida to make the region an issue - all luck - Wednesday, Aug 19, 20 @ 2:51 pm: As follow up on my last post, these are the numbers I pulled off NY Times map Average daily cases per 100,000 people in the past week Morgan- 68 Coles- 44 Effingham- 43 Scott- 40 Moultrie- 39 - MSIX - Wednesday, Aug 19, 20 @ 10:40 pm: =Region 6 really seems like it needs to be split into non-Champaign and Champaign. Coles (2nd) Effingham (3rd) and Moultrie (5th) are among the highest per capita positive cases in state over last week with not great positivity rates but Champaign is testing so many more tests than rest of counties combined that Coles and the rest of the counties would have to turn into peak Florida to make the region an issue= I wonder if U of I’s tests figure into Champaign county’s numbers. U of I is testing almost all folks on campus twice a week and have been doing so since July. So a lot of non-infected people are being tested over and over again and keep showing up negative. That makes for a low positivity rate. I just tested negative last week. If you tested me every day since then, you’d have 7 tests with a 0% positivity rate. If U of I tests 10k people with 200 testing positive, quarantines those 200 people, then two days later tests the remaining 9,800 with no positives, their positivity rate will plummet. Admittedly this is a great way to quickly separate positive cases before they can spread because you’ll catch them right away, but it sort of negates the use of positivity rate as a metric, I would think. That said, I’m not a statistics wonk, so I could be “auf dem Holzweg” here. - John Gregory (ex-IRN) - Thursday, Aug 20, 20 @ 11:41 am: To Archie Dbunker: Kary Mullis never said that, and the misattributed quote was taken out of context. https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-pcr/fact-check-inventor-of-method-used-to-test-for-covid-19-didnt-say-it-cant-be-used-in-virus-detection-idUSKBN24420X Sorry, comments for this post are now closed.