PEORIA, Ill. — The Peoria City/County Health Department announced five new COVID-19 cases in the Tri-County area on Tuesday at their news briefing.
There are now 37 cases: 15 in Peoria County, 15 in Tazewell County and seven in Woodford County.
There are 16 persons under investigation or known to have COVID-19 in ICU beds in Peoria. There are 36 under investigation or known to have COVID-19 in non-ICU beds.
At his daily address, Gov. J.B. Pritzker said that Peoria currently has 42% of ICU beds available.
As cases continue to rise, Public Health Administrator Monica Hendrickson says she hopes we don’t have to use makeshift hospitals as a result of low capacity.
“We don’t, at the time, have a lot of human resources or equipment to necessarily expand over to another hospital,” said Hendrickson. “It would take a lot to put our over 1,000 bed capacity and 300 bed ICU into a point where we have to go into alternate care and hopefully we don’t have to get to that point.”
Gov. Pritzker said that Peoria’s capacity is being monitored closely.
Peoria Park District Executive Director Emily Cahill spoke about the district’s availability during the stay-at-home order.
Cahill said that people can still come and walk or bike on their trails as long as social distancing guidelines are being followed.
Park district basketball rims were removed last week because people were still congregating in groups larger than ten and broke social distancing guidelines, said Cahill.
As of right now, the tennis courts are still available as players are further apart while playing tennis than other sports.
“If you keep your group size under 10 and you socially distance, just naturally because you’re on two sides of the net and you’re able to spread yourselves out, that is an activity that we are continuing to support because it is possible to do that socially distanced,” Cahill said.
Cahill said that if they see people gathering in groups larger than 10 on tennis courts the park district will have to restrict access to those as well.
Cahill reminded those who see groups gathering larger than 10 to call the non-emergency police number.
Peoria Sheriff’s Office Victim Service Coordinator Aimee Shinall also addressed the public and warned of scams on the rise related to COVID-19.
“These scammers have no boundaries, they will try and reach you in any way they can,” Shinall said. “Often they will use the following: telephone, email, text message, in person door-to-door, online links, websites, social media scams, pages, groups.”
Shinall added that one scam currently going around is to verify bank information for stimulus checks and also reminded residents to never give bank information over the phone, email or text messaging.
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