12,119 new cases, 205 more deaths

Florida reported 12,119 new coronavirus cases on Saturday and another 205 new resident deaths linked to COVID-19. The state has now reported 1,560,186 cases since the pandemic began.

South Florida

Palm Beach County: 658 additional cases and 15 more deaths. The county now has

96,743 confirmed cases and

2,062 deaths, including 29 non-residents.

Broward County: 1,138 additional cases and 2 more deaths. Broward has a known total of 157,590 cases and 1,992 deaths since the beginning of the pandemic. The death tally includes 35 non-residents.

Miami-Dade County:

2,408 additional cases and

33 new deaths. The county now has 341,842 confirmed cases and 4,589 deaths, including 28 non-residents.

Testing and positivity

Public health experts say the virus is considered under control when the COVID-19 test positivity rate is under 5%. But since Oct. 29, Florida has exceeded 5% in its widely publicized calculation for assessing the rate for testing of residents.

The state reported a daily positivity rate of 8.53% on Saturday, down from

10.14% the day before. This method of calculating positivity counts new infections only, but also counts repeat negative tests, which skews the figure downward.

According to the state, the new reported case numbers reflect the results of 140,295

COVID-19 tests of Florida residents received from labs in the past day, down from

163,164 results reported the day before.

Palm Beach County: Test results for 8,878 residents were reported Saturday, leading to a daily positivity rate of 7.24%. That’s down from 9.69% the previous day.

Broward County: Test results for 14,779 residents were reported Saturday, leading to a daily positivity rate of 7.66%. That’s down from 8.61% the previous day.

Miami-Dade County: Test results for 28,833 residents were reported Saturday, leading to a daily positivity rate of 8.39%. That’s down from 8.94% the previous day.

Deaths

The state’s pandemic data report shows a total of 24,004 Floridians have died from COVID-19. In addition, 376 non-residents have died after contracting the virus. Most of the fatalities reported Saturday happened over several weeks but were just confirmed in the past day.

Out of all 50 states and the District of Columbia, Florida ranks No. 24 for deaths per 100,000 residents and No. 24 for cases per 100,000 residents, according to the latest data from the health department and the COVID Tracking Project.

Hospitalizations

As of Saturday, there were 7,364 people hospitalized in Florida with a primary diagnosis of COVID-19, according to the state Agency for Health Care Administration.

In South Florida, Broward

County reported 643, Palm Beach County had 423 and Miami-Dade had 1,024.

Hospitalizations hit a peak in late July of about 9,500 patients statewide, then dipped as low as 2,011 on Oct. 19. The numbers steadily increased throughout November and December.

Vaccines

In Florida, 769,765 people have received their first dose of the vaccine, or about 3.58% of the population.

So far, 79,552 people have completed the series of doses required to be vaccinated. That represents about 0.37% of the population.