Three more COVID-19 deaths among Forest Park residents, one on Dec. 2 and two on Dec. 5, bring the town’s total to 19.
On Dec. 2, a 68-year-old man died from acute hypoxemic respiratory failure and coronavirus infection. On Dec. 5, two women died, one 90, the other 106.
Including the death of a 73-year-old man on Nov. 29, there have been four COVID-19 deaths among residents in one week.
Of Forest Park’s 19 COVID-19 deaths, 12 have been among residents of Aperion, 8200 Roosevelt Rd. All deaths among Forest Park residents were among people with underlying health conditions, from obesity to diabetes to hypertension to congestive heart failure.
Forest Park’s total confirmed cases of COVID-19 since the start of the pandemic is 713. There were 66 new cases reported last week. The good news is there was a 2.31 percent drop in confirmed cases over the past two weeks, so, at least temporarily, the town saw a slow-down in positive cases. For more information, visit the Cook County Department of Public Health’s website that tracks COVID by town at https://ccdphcd.shinyapps.io/covid19/.
As for Region 10, the portion of the state that includes Forest Park and all of suburban Cook County in Governor J. B. Pritzker’s Restore Illinois plan, it, like all of Illinois, is still under Tier 3 mitigations. These include no indoor dining or drinking at restaurants or bars, among other restrictions.
To be allowed to relax mitigation efforts, according to the Illinois Department of Public Health, a region must experience:
- less than 12 percent test positivity rate (on a 7-day rolling average) for three consecutive days and
- greater than 20 percent availability in both ICU beds and medical/surgical beds for three days (on a 3-day rolling average) and
- a decline in the number of COVID-19 patients in the hospital (on a 7-day rolling average) in 7 out of the last 10 days.
As of Dec. 7, Region 10 met only the third of these criteria.
