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Illinois on Friday surpassed 14,000 COVID-19 deaths since the pandemic began, less than a week after the statewide death toll reached 13,000.

The state reported an additional 190 deaths of people with COVID-19 on Friday, with fatalities continuing to be consistently high in December as the state continues to battle the aggressive fall coronavirus resurgence.

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While the authorization of the Pfizer coronavirus vaccine has provided hope that the end of the pandemic may be in sight, there continues to be a persistently high number of deaths in Illinois and throughout the country.

“We all want the deaths to come down. I think the light at the end of the tunnel is the vaccine and getting as many people vaccinated as will be vaccinated based on the supply,” Illinois Department of Public Health Director Dr. Ngozi Ezike said Friday at a coronavirus briefing in Chicago.

“But if we don’t keep on this path of trying to wear our mask and stay at home, we could have a big surge,” she said. “We’re already teetering. We have some areas where there are a dozen beds, a dozen ICU beds in the region right now. So a big surge cannot be handled.”

As of Thursday night, 5,141 people across the state were hospitalized with COVID-19, with 1,081 in intensive care units and 635 on ventilators. The number of statewide hospitalizations has come down over the past few weeks, after reaching as high as 6,175 on Nov. 20.

The state reported 9,420 new and probable cases of COVID-19 Friday, which came out of a batch of 104,448 tests. The seven-day statewide positivity rate for cases as a share of total tests stood at 9.4% for the period ending Thursday, down from 10.3% a week earlier. The state reported that throughout the course of the pandemic, 832,951 known and probable cases have been identified in Illinois.

Officials have said the COVID-19 inoculations could begin in a matter of days for the priority groups, including health care workers and long-term care facilities.

Gov. J.B. Pritzker said a state review panel is “poised to review all available FDA data and based on all information to date, the team is optimistic that this vaccine can safely move forward.”

“Federal officials have told us that these first doses will be shipped out to states within 24 hours of approval, and Illinois is prepared to quickly get this vaccine to our front-line health care workforce,” Pritzker said.

Pritzker’s administration last week released details about its updated plan for distributing the initial vaccine shipment throughout the state, which prioritizes the 50 counties that have seen the highest per capita death rates during the pandemic, via 10 regional hospital distribution points.

That initial plan did not include counties where a few of those regional hospitals are located in the group of 50, but “since then we’ve made some revisions to our allocation to make sure that every regional hospital will get a portion of vaccine to distribute in week one,” Ezike said Friday.

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