Illinois Schools Likely Biggest Culprit Of COVID Exposure: IDPH

CHICAGO — More than 42 percent of people who tested positive for COVID-19 in Illinois and were interviewed by state health officials believe that they may have exposed to the virus in school settings, according to data released by the state health department.

Illinois Department of Public Health officials provided a pie chart of responses taken from interviews conducted as part of contact tracing efforts. The interviews, health officials said, asked participants to recall locations where they had been in the previous 14 days preceding when they began to experience COVID-19 symptoms or provided specimens for COVID-19 testing.

The number of respondents who said they believed that their exposure to COVID-19 may have taken place at schools was more than four times that of people who believed their exposure occurred at any other location, according to data released by the health department. Nearly 15,000 respondents said that their exposure came at schools across the state, with the next largest number of respondents (3,270) cited "other" locations for exposure, data shows.

Health officials said that locations provided by cases should be interpreted as locations where COVID-19 exposure may have occurred, not that these are definitive exposure or outbreak locations.

The information released was collected 30 days within the date of when state COVID-19 totals were announced.

Aside from schools, which represented the largest number of responses from 14,990 respondents (42.6 percent), the largest areas represented in the data were “Other” (3,270, 9.29 percent), hospital or clinics (2,043, 5.85 percent), restaurants or bars (1,777, 5.09 percent), businesses or retail (1,542, 4.42 percent), office settings (1,416, 4.06 percent), grocery store (1,386, 3.97 percent), factory (1,141, 3.27 percent) day care (925, 3.97 percent).