But Dr. Ngozi Ezike, director of the Illinois Department of Public Health, said Tuesday such claims could not be further from the truth.
In fact, the number of deaths in the state is likely higher than what’s been reported, she said.
An analysis from The New York Times estimated
coronavirus has likely killed hundreds more Illinoisans than what’s been counted so far.
The state only attributes deaths to coronavirus with a laboratory assessment, Ezike said, and the data reported by the state comes from hospitals and other agencies.
Ezike said the state is now looking back at deaths in early March or late February to see if someone died from the virus before officials realized it had hit the state.
But the state’s death toll does not include people who had coronavirus but obviously died from something else, Ezike said.
“As we learn more about the disease, there may have been less typical presentations of COVID-19 that were not appropriately attributed to COVID because there wasn’t a test done because the suspicion was not there,” Ezike said. “There [are] also some additional deaths [of people] who happened to be COVID-positive but the COVID infection had nothing to do with the death.”
