* Click here for a PowerPoint presentation that the governor intends to talk about today.

* Hal Dardick at the Tribune…

As Illinois finally nears its goal of employing 3,800 people to track down and warn the contacts of people infected with COVID-19, experts say that number may no longer be sufficient to help control the virus.

That’s because contact tracing — which aims to reduce disease spread by identifying and isolating people who could be infectious — works best when infection rates are relatively low. The state is seeing record numbers of daily confirmed cases.

“Contact tracing is not a silver bullet, and it can be overwhelmed very quickly with an expanding epidemic, because cases will appear and transmission will occur much more quickly than a health department can hire contact tracers,” said Crystal Watson, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. “So, there is kind of a threshold at which contact tracing becomes much less effective.

“And so, what we need to do in those cases is use other interventions like enforcing mask use and physical distancing and shutting down indoor areas.”

Watson is part of a team at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security and National Public Radio that has tracked the status of contact tracing in the United States. They concluded in a recent report that once a state is logging more than 10 new COVID-19 cases daily for every 100,000 residents, contact tracers become overwhelmed.

Illinois has quadruple that number of new cases per 100K residents.

* Beware antigen test results…

As rapid tests are becoming more widely available, delivering results in minutes in doctor’s offices, nursing homes, schools and even the White House, officials warn of a significant undercount, blurring the spread.

Officials say that antigen tests, which are faster than polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tests but less able to detect low levels of the virus, are an important tool for limiting the spread. But they caution that with inconsistent public reporting, the case undercount may worsen.

“We want to be sure that we’re not now saying, ‘there’s no disease,’ when there is lots of disease. All that’s happened is that the science with which we identify it has evolved,” said Janet Hamilton, the executive director of the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists, the group that helps the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention define cases of the coronavirus.

* Tribune live blog headlines…

Chicago’s jazz clubs struggle to stay afloat

National Guard arriving Monday at some Indiana nursing homes hard hit by COVID-19 cases

COVID-19 restrictions take effect in east-central Illinois

Chicago health officials urge people to get flu shots

As the pandemic wears on, more working moms are forced to quit their jobs, and the impact of the ‘shecession’ could be long-lasting

* Sun-Times live blog headlines…

Surging COVID-19 numbers spark Election Day concerns for polling places

COVID-19 recruiting tips for high school basketball players

Hospitals strain to find new nurses as COVID-19 rates rise

10 more chief judge’s employees test positive for the coronavirus, including 7 at juvenile detention building