* Hospitalizations are down 33.19 percent from last Thursday (Friday, you will recall, was a holiday). However, the governor’s projection last week of just 500 hospitalizations by tomorrow turned out to be way off track. That projection was used to buttress the argument in favor of lifting the state mask mandate on February 28th. Barring a miracle, the actual number will be around three times that. “As long as they’re still going down, that’s all we need to see,” a spokesperson told me today. So, the end of the mandate is still on track. IDPH press release…

The Illinois Department of Public Health (IDPH) today reported 20,896 new confirmed and probable cases of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) in Illinois, including an increase of 417 deaths since February 11, 2022.

Currently, IDPH is reporting a total of 3,013,709 cases, including 32,299 deaths, in 102 counties in Illinois. The age of cases ranges from younger than one to older than 100 years. Since February 11, 2022, laboratories have reported 884,390 specimens for a total of 53,621,982. As of last night, 1,590 individuals in Illinois were reported to be in the hospital with COVID-19. Of those, 303 patients were in the ICU and 132 patients with COVID-19 were on ventilators.

The preliminary seven-day statewide positivity for cases as a percent of total test from February 11-17, 2022 is 2.4%. The preliminary seven-day statewide test positivity from February 11- 17, 2022 is 3.1%.

Due to decreased demand at the state community-based testing sites (CBTS) and the availability of free at-home COVID-19 tests, the state testing locations will now be open on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays beginning this weekend. Locations previously open on Sundays will be closed this Sunday. The hours of operation at the locations will remain the same and can be found on the IDPH website COVID-19 testing page. We have seen an 87% drop in testing across the 10 state CBTS locations from the first of the year until now, and most locations are averaging fewer than 500 tests a week. To order free at-home COVID-19 tests from the federal government, go to covidtests.gov.

A total of 20,971,401 vaccines have been administered in Illinois as of last midnight. The seven-day rolling average of vaccines administered daily is 20,003 doses. Since February 11, 2022, 140,021 doses were reported administered in Illinois. Of Illinois’ total population, almost 76% has received at least one COVID-19 vaccine dose, 67% of Illinois’ total population is fully vaccinated, and more than 48% boosted according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

All data are provisional and will change. Additional information and COVID-19 data can be found at https://dph.illinois.gov/covid19.html.

Vaccination is the key to ending this pandemic. To find a COVID-19 vaccination location near you, go to www.vaccines.gov.

* This is a darned good analogy…

It’s suddenly become acceptable to say that COVID is—or will soon be—like the flu. Such analogies have long been the preserve of pandemic minimizers, but lately they’ve been creeping into more enlightened circles. Last month the dean of a medical school wrote an open letter to his students suggesting that for a vaccinated person, the risk of death from COVID-19 is “in the same realm, or even lower, as the average American’s risk from flu.” A few days later, David Leonhardt said as much to his millions of readers in the The New York Times’ morning newsletter. And three prominent public-health experts have called for the government to recognize a “new normal” in which the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus “is but one of several circulating respiratory viruses that include influenza, respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), and more.”

The end state of this pandemic may indeed be one where COVID comes to look something like the flu. Both diseases, after all, are caused by a dangerous respiratory virus that ebbs and flows in seasonal cycles. But I’d propose a different metaphor to help us think about our tenuous moment: The “new normal” will arrive when we acknowledge that COVID’s risks have become more in line with those of smoking cigarettes—and that many COVID deaths, like many smoking-related deaths, could be prevented with a single intervention.

The pandemic’s greatest source of danger has transformed from a pathogen into a behavior. Choosing not to get vaccinated against COVID is, right now, a modifiable health risk on par with smoking, which kills more than 400,000 people each year in the United States. Andrew Noymer, a public-health professor at UC Irvine, told me that if COVID continues to account for a few hundred thousand American deaths every year—“a realistic worst-case scenario,” he calls it—that would wipe out all of the life-expectancy gains we’ve accrued from the past two decades’ worth of smoking-prevention efforts.

The COVID vaccines are, without exaggeration, among the safest and most effective therapies in all of modern medicine. An unvaccinated adult is an astonishing 68 times more likely to die from COVID than a boosted one. Yet widespread vaccine hesitancy in the United States has caused more than 163,000 preventable deaths and counting. Because too few people are vaccinated, COVID surges still overwhelm hospitals—interfering with routine medical services and leading to thousands of lives lost from other conditions. If everyone who is eligible were triply vaccinated, our health-care system would be functioning normally again. (We do have other methods of protection—antiviral pills and monoclonal antibodies—but these remain in short supply and often fail to make their way to the highest-risk patients.) Countries such as Denmark and Sweden have already declared themselves broken up with COVID. They are confidently doing so not because the virus is no longer circulating or because they’ve achieved mythical herd immunity from natural infection; they’ve simply inoculated enough people.

And, like tobacco smoke, what comes out of your mouth and nose can harm others.

* AP…

California became the first state to formally shift to an “endemic” approach to the coronavirus with Gov. Gavin Newsom’s announcement Thursday of a plan that emphasizes prevention and quick reaction to outbreaks over mandated masking and business shutdowns.

The milestone, nearly two years in the making, envisions a return to a more normal existence with the help of a variety of initiatives and billions in new spending to more quickly spot surges or variants, add health care workers, stockpile tests and push back against false claims and other misinformation.

“We are moving past the crisis phase into a phase where we will work to live with this virus,” he said during a news conference from a state warehouse brimming with pandemic supplies in Fontana, east of Los Angeles. […]

A disease reaches the endemic stage when the virus still exists in a community but becomes manageable as immunity builds. But there will be no definitive turn of the switch, the Democratic governor said, unlike the case with Wednesday’s lifting of the state’s indoor masking requirements or an announcement coming Feb. 28 of when precisely schoolchildren can stop wearing face coverings.

And there will be no immediate lifting of the dozens of remaining executive emergency orders that have helped run the state since Newsom imposed the nation’s first statewide stay-home order in March 2020. […]

Newsom’s plan sets specific goals, such as stockpiling 75 million masks, establishing the infrastructure to provide up to 200,000 vaccinations and 500,000 tests a day in the event of an outbreak, and adding 3,000 medical workers within three weeks in surge areas.

* More…

His administration has devised an easy-to-remember acronym for the new strategy: SMARTER, which stands for Shots, Masks, Awareness, Readiness, Testing, Education and Rx, the last of which refers to prescription medications for COVID-19.

California ended indoor mask requirements for vaccinated people Wednesday and will announce Feb. 28 how long the mandate for schools will remain in place.

The approach moving forward will emphasize increased vaccination and testing, fighting misinformation, stockpiling medical supplies and flooding areas of virus surge with temporary medical workers. The plan also calls for boosting the state’s surveillance, including increased monitoring of virus remnants in wastewater to watch for the first signs of a surge.