CARBONDALE — During a stop Tuesday in Carbondale, Governor JB Pritzker warned that the COVID-19 outbreak is now worse in southern Illinois than it is in Chicago.

Pritzker said he visited Jackson County because the COVID-19 pandemic, which once seemed tame in Carbondale and throughout the entire region, is surging in the area.

He said the virus is worse in Jackson County than in Chicago and if changes aren’t seen in the area, the virus will cause some businesses to close and an increasing percentage of people to get sick and some will even die.

Jackson County is one of eleven counties listed at the “warning level” for COVID-19 by the Illinois Department of Public Health (IDPH). Seven of the eleven counties are in southern Illinois.

The Governor said Southern Illinois and Metro East are both seeing troubling trends, with seven-day rolling positivity rates of 7.4% and 7.3%, respectively, which are the highest in the state of Illinois.

Health officials say that over the past 21 days, there have been 287 new cases of COVID-19 in Jackson County.

This represents 44-percent of their total cases to date in just three weeks.

According to the health department, nearly 70-percent of COVID-19 cases reported in the county in July were individuals in their teens and twenties.