Saying that widespread vaccination is the lone way the United States will get out of the COVID-19 pandemic, President Joe Biden on Thursday urged businesses to take up vaccine mandates.
“I know the vaccination requirements are tough medicine, unpopular with some, politics for others, but they’re life-saving and game-changing for our country,” Biden said during a visit to a manufacturing facility in Elk Grove Village. “We’re in a position to leap forward in a way that we haven’t for a long long time economically.”
The Biden administration announced last month it would direct the U.S. Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration to mandate COVID-19 vaccine for businesses with 100 or more workers. Biden said Thursday the agency is working to finalize that emergency rule.
Additionally, Biden said the country still has a long way to go before it is out of the pandemic, despite recent positive trends in the national COVID-19 trends, and reiterated it is now a “pandemic of the unvaccinated.”
“The unvaccinated overcrowd our hospitals, overrunning emergency rooms and intensive care units, the unvaccinated patients are leaving no room for someone with a heart attack or a need of a cancer operation, and so much more because they can’t get in the ICU, they can’t get into the operating rooms,” Biden said. “The unvaccinated also put our economy at risk because people are reluctant to go out.”
The Illinois Department of Public Health reported 3,371 new COVID-19 cases and 36 deaths on Thursday.
The new cases bring the state’s total to 1,647,364, while the death toll is 25,189.
As of Wednesday, 1,676 Illinoisans were in the hospital with COVID-19, down 71 from Tuesday and down 164 from the prior week.
Of the patients in the hospital, 409 were in the ICU, down 16 from Tuesday and down 44 from the prior week. There were 216 patients on ventilators, down seven from Tuesday and down nine from the prior week.
The seven-day statewide positivity rate for cases as a percent of total tests is 2.2 percent. The seven-day statewide test positivity using the number of COVID-19 positive tests over total tests is 2.6 percent.
About 80.4 percent of eligible Illinoisans ages 12 and older have received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. About 62.9 percent are fully vaccinated.
Illinois vaccinators have administered 14,789,589 COVID-19 vaccines, per state data. The seven-day average of doses administered is 33,510.