While the Governor’s ban on indoor dining is largely not being followed in South Central Illinois, it remains in effect with no definitive date to end.
Illinois is currently under tier three mitigations and even moving to Tier Two won’t let restaurants and bars resume indoor service.
Governor JB Pritzker says the state still needs to see cases and hospitalizations go down in order for those rules to be lifted.
“What we don’t want to do is swing back and forth between mitigations and not having mitigations within days or week or two of one another.”
The Governor says there are still a concerning number of coronavirus patients in the hospital, especially the ICU.
“That number has come down, but that number is down only 200 from its peak. I’d like to see it come down a little more. We’ll get there I believe shortly. We also want to see how the Christmas and New Year’s Holiday go,” said Pritzker.
In the Christmas Day report, there were still 4,352 listed as hospitalized from COVID-19. 928 of those were in ICU and 538 on ventilators. 135 were still hospitalized in the Southern Illinois Region, 210 in the Metro East Region, and 193 in East Central Illinois.
