The city’s vaccine mandate for bar and restaurant patrons could be rescinded “quite soon” if COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations keep falling as drastically as they have over the past two weeks, Chicago's top doctor said Tuesday.
The officials offered those nuggets of cautious optimism as the Illinois Department of Public Health reported the state’s latest 8,665 positive tests — a number that would’ve sounded alarm bells in the fall, but that now represents a 66% decline in cases over the past three weeks.
The virus has claimed an average of 109 Illinois lives per day over the last week, including 123 deaths reported Tuesday. But that tragic rate has fallen by about 17% since last week.Chicago restaurant owners are asking the federal government for more money to help them weather the Covid-19 pandemic. FOX 32's Kasey Chronis has more.
"We’re not going to keep the vaccination requirement just because we like it. We’re keeping it because the risk remains higher at this point," she said at a City Hall news conference. "And yeah, I am feeling confident that it will be able to come off relatively soon, and if we keep seeing a 50% drop week over week, that could be quite soon."
"We actually weathered [the Omicron surge] as well or better than most, and it’s because we’ve kept in place a mask requirement not only in schools with adults and kids, but also indoors," Pritzker said at an unrelated news conference in Springfield. "I want to get rid of masks as fast as we can when it is feasible to keep people safe."
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