This is Curious City editor, Alexandra Solomon.

Since we've been under the stay-at-home order, we've gotten used to the constant tallies of new cases of COVID-19, and of course, the number of deaths.

In today's episode, we're going to take on a question from one listener who's been monitoring those numbers.

And later, I'll talk with a researcher about something called caution fatigue.

Essentially, the reason why some of us might not be following the safety guidelines

like we were at the beginning of the pandemic.

My colleague Monica Eng starts us off.

It's been almost two months since Illinois' stay-at-home order came down.

It was meant to slow the spread of COVID-19 in the state.

But this month, we hit new peaks in deaths and cases.

Just this week, we had more than 4,000 new people test positive in a single day. So

question asker, Gary Lucido, wrote in to say, I would have expected with us being in isolation

this long that we would have actually seen a significant decline. So I'm wondering how are people

still getting infected? Yeah. I mean, think about it. If we're doing all this stuff to

stop the virus from spreading, why are people still getting sick? To find out, I recently

scoured the data and talked to local experts on infectious disease. What I found is that there

are a bunch of reasons we're still seeing a lot of new cases in the state.

And number one is testing.

We're just doing a lot more of it.

Here's Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker last week.

Illinois has made important and measurable progress in growing our daily test numbers.

Today, for the first time, exceeding 20,000 tests. This week, those daily tests jumped

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