Surpassing 25,000 dead in Illinois from COVID-19: How pandemic evolved from killing Chicagoans to southern Illinoisans
CHICAGO — They include a retired nurse from Chicago’s South Side, a former teacher from Mount Vernon and a lawyer in Carbondale.
They joined others from all races and ethnicities, from deeply Republican to deeply Democratic parts of the state, more old than young, but all adding up, day after day, to propel Illinois to reach one more grim milestone for the pandemic this month: 25,000 official COVID-19 deaths, and counting.
Illinois crossed that threshold Oct. 1, after closing out its deadliest month since last winter, tallying more than 1,000 deaths in September alone. And the 25,000 doesn’t count about 2,700 additional deaths deemed as probable COVID-19 cases.
As the known death toll has grown over 18 months, a Tribune analysis of state and federal data shows how the pandemic’s deadly waves have evolved since March 2020 amid starkly different mask-wearing and vaccination habits across the state.
Deaths were originally clustered in Chicago’s more Black and Latino neighborhoods, but then spread beyond the Chicago area, to the point the virus has killed a greater proportionate share of residents in rural southern Illinois than dense Chicago.
Those trends were accentuated by the fourth and most recent of the pandemic’s surges, which began after vaccines were widely available. The Tribune found residents near Illinois’ southern tip — the least vaccinated — were nearly eight times as likely to have died in the latest surge than those living in the most vaccinated region, covering DuPage and Kane counties.
“We’ve had a pandemic now that’s among the unvaccinated,” said Dr. Ngozi Ezike, the director of Illinois’ Department of Public Health.
“And that just makes it more sad that we haven’t been able to get
