Jessica Hockett, PhD
Note to July 2026 readers: These charts were originally posted, in response to a reader request, as an update to this very brief reaction to a J.B. Pritzker tweet in 2022. I am republishing them separately for easier reference and categorization.
The biggest problem with hospital data, not only for Illinois, but for every state, is that (as far as I am aware) earlier weeks and years have never been released. The datasets begin “too late,” leaving us with no sense of the baseline or of what was going on, according to official data, earlier in the 2019–2020 flu season. In the post below, I was troubled by the incomplete data for Illinois and called upon officials to release daily figures prior to 1 April 2020 and going back to 1 January 2017.
At the federal level, full release and disclosure of these data falls within the purview of the Department of Health and Human Services. I have received no response to a complaint I filed earlier this year with HHS-OIG regarding New York City data. I remain concerned about the agency’s failure to gather and release data showing how many nursing home residents die each year, irrespective of the setting of death, especially for 2020.
Nursing home residents and patients in hospice facilities and hospitals who are “on the precipice” and likely to die there within weeks or months (aka, damaged ships) are very easy to “use” is staging or feigning a disease-spread crisis.
A point that I and others made in 2020 and beyond about U.S. hospitals is that, even according to “official” data, hospitals were never overrun with patients. -JAH, 21 July 2026
8 October 2022: Posting Illinois Hospital data, by request. Remember a “covid hospitalization” or “covid patient” is a person who tested positive for covid upon hospital admission or at some point during his/her stay. It is not someone who has been hospitalized because of or due to covid. Source: HHS
https://healthdata.gov/resource/g62h-syeh.csv?state=IL&$where=date between %272020-01-01%27 and %272022-10-07%27&$order=date%20DESC
Source: IDPH (images pulled from tweets I posted)
https://dph.illinois.gov/covid19/data/data-portal/covid-19-hospitalization-utilization.html
IDPH data do not disaggregate covid-positive patients from PUI patients. (PUI = patients under investigation, i.e., awaiting a test result). HHS data for Illinois indicate PUI is anywhere from 5-10% of the total “Covid Patient” number, on average.
Illinois legislators, media, and residents should demand the Governor release capacity and occupancy data from January 1, 2017-March 30, 2020, for comparative purposes.
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