Illinois reported over 10,000 new daily COVID-19 cases for the first time on Friday, though the Department of Public Health said they have changed how they report cases.
Following Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidance, the department said in a statement it will combine confirmed COVID-19 cases and probable cases in its reporting going forward.
The department defines a probable case as meeting clinical criteria and is epidemiologically linked or has a positive antigen test. If a probable case is later confirmed, the case will be deduplicated and will only be counted once.
Probable deaths and confirmed deaths will continue to be reported separately.
The 10,376 new cases reported Friday comes as the state has processed 98,401 tests over the past 24 hours, a new single-day high for testing.
The total number of COVID-19 cases is now 465,540.
The state’s death toll is at 10,079 after 49 more deaths were reported on Friday.
The seven-day statewide positivity rate for cases as a percent of total tests is 9.6 percent, a 2.3 percent increase from last week. The preliminary seven-day statewide test positivity using the number of COVID-19 positive tests over total tests is 11.1 percent.
The 98,401 tests processed over the past 24 hours brings the total number of tests processed to 8,215,129.
As of Thursday night, 4,090 Illinoisans were in the hospital with COVID-19, an increase of 998 from last week. Of the patients in the hospital this week, 786 were in the ICU and 339 patients were on ventilators.
Thirty-one percent of Illinois’ 35,095 hospital beds were available as of Friday morning. Thirty-two percent of the state’s 3,773 ICU beds were available as were 74 percent of the state’s 5,713 ventilators.