There was one single, stark number released Thursday by Illinois health officials that overshadows all others: the highest number of single-day deaths of Illinois residents at 125.
That’s more than 50% more people than those who died in the previous worst single-day count, more than a week ago.
NBC 5 Investigates found that Thursday’s death toll in Cook County alone – at 92 fatalities – also topped that previous one-day death toll for the entire state.
As far as new cases, while some counties' bar charts still hint at a possible leveling off, NBC 5 Investigates found some stark increases Thursday in a distinct cluster of Chicago-area counties south and east of the city:
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Toggle the menu on the chart above to find sharp increases in Kankakee County (26 new cases just today) and in the row of Indiana’s counties along Lake Michigan: Lake County, Indiana, saw its highest one-day increase ever, with 102 new cases.
Just to the east, Porter County had 13 new cases. LaPorte County looks like it could be a typographical error with a whopping 70 new cases in the past 24 hours, but NBC 5 Investigates double-checked with LaPorte health officials, and that number is correct.
That means that in the past 24 hours LaPorte’s caseload nearly tripled. And just to the east of LaPorte, St. Joseph has seen 112 new cases in just the past three days.
Walworth Count in Wisconsin, northwest of Chicago, also saw its highest one-day increase of cases at 22, a near 50% increase in just 24 hours.
NBC 5 Investigates also continues to track all Illinois coronavirus cases by zip code, and for the second day in a row the village of Park Forest, in Chicago’s south suburbs, continues to be the hardest-hit area, in terms of total coronavirus cases per capita. One out of every 117 residents of Park Forest has tested positive for coronavirus.
You can search this table by zip code or community, to see a specific area’s number of cases, and how those cases pan out, per capita. NBC5 Investigates continues to update all of these charts, each afternoon.
