Orange County COVID-19 cases fall
The rate of positive coronavirus tests in Orange County dipped below 11% on Monday for the second day in a row, offering a glimmer of hope that the latest surge in new cases could be starting to wane as officials said they continue to monitor hospital staffing as the number of patients with COVID-19 rises.
The Florida Department of Health reported a rate of positive tests for Sunday and Monday of 10% and 10.7%, respectively. There were 1,353 positive cases out of more than 13,000 tests reported Sunday and 924 positives out of 8,613 tests reported Monday.
Those rates mean a downward trend in the percent of tests coming back positive is holding steady for now in Orange County, where Walt Disney World just reopened, an MLS tournament is underway and the NBA is about to resume playing games.
The World Health Organization recommends a positivity rate of less than 5% as a threshold to determine if enough testing is being done and how much the virus is spreading in a region.
“If a positivity rate is too high,
that may indicate that the state is only testing the sickest patients who seek medical attention, and is not casting a wide enough net to know how much of the virus is spreading within its communities,” says the Johns Hopkins University Coronavirus Research Center.
Johns Hopkins puts Florida’s overall positivity rate at 18.6%, one of 35 states higher than the 5% threshold. Only South Carolina, Mississippi and Arizona have higher rates.
Those figures are calculated differently from what the state health department reports. Florida reports it’s own cumulative positivity rate as 10.7%
The rate in Orange County for the week that ended Saturday was the lowest in a month at 12.1%. The highest weekly positive rate came during the week that ended June 27 when 16.7% of tests came back positive for the virus.
Orange County also added three more fatalities since Friday, bringing the number of deaths to 83.
At the same time fewer people between the age of 20 and 40 are making up new cases of the virus, said Dr. Raul Pino, the state’s health officer in Orange, during a Monday briefing. That means the pandemic is, once again, shifting to an older and more vulnerable population.
Orange reported an unusually large batch of test results — more than 20,000 — on Sunday and Monday as the state has blamed long waits for results on a national backlog in labs. Between Sunday and Monday, the county received as many results as it had in the previous six days.
Pino said his team is investigating why so many results were reported at once. He said it could be due to labs clearing some backlogs. He also noted that some labs had been reporting results to the state via FAX machine, a technology considered novel in the 1980s, and the state has encouraged more of them to stand up electronic reporting.
In addition, tests from the NBA and MLS bubbles are now included in the county data. Hundreds of people associated with the sports’ return are tested often, if not daily.
Those cases could be influencing the data because players are mostly kept isolated, they so far have a disproportionate number of negative tests compared to the general population. Pino said he’s trying to see if that data can be kept separate.
The NBA and NBA Players’ Association announced Monday that two players have received confirmed positive cases since arriving in Orlando. Those players have left the Disney campus to self-isolate, the statement reads. The league has tested 322 players so far.
The large number of tests reported in recent days aren’t unique to Orange. Florida has received results for tens of thousands more tests than normal, peaking Sunday, when it reported results of more than 136,000 tests – more than double the previous Sunday.
Orange County Mayor Jerry Demings said Monday that he remains in close contact with hospital executives. He stopped short of saying he would push for another shutdown of businesses in the county, though he noted he would consider reinstating a curfew if he thought it was needed.
“If we continue to see the numbers go up, I don’t want to get to the point where we approach capacity in our hospitals,” Demings said. “The numbers we will review and evaluate will set the stage for some additional decision-making points as a community.”
The mayor said the Orange County Convention Center is being reviewed by the Army Corps of Engineers as a possible care facility if needed to relieve pressure on hospitals.
In neighboring Osceola County, 13.4% of about 2,000 tests came back positive, while 10.5% of 2,200 cases came back positive in Seminole. In Lake County, 6.7% of nearly 2,000 tests were positive.