Florida reports highest number of new COVID-19 cases in more than a month
Florida on Tuesday posted its highest number of new COVID-19 cases since early February, continuing a generally upward trend that’s lasted for the past several weeks.
Florida reported 9,068 new coronavirus cases on Tuesday and another 64 new resident deaths linked to COVID-19. The state has now reported 2,134,914 cases since the pandemic began.
The high case count followed a day on which the state reported its lowest number of new cases in six months, although that drop stood out among weeks of increases and appeared to result largely from a sudden decrease in testing. The last day to report more cases than Tuesday came on Feb. 5, when the state reported 11,543 new cases.
South Florida
Palm Beach County: 469 additional cases and 1 more deaths. The county now has 136,675 confirmed cases and 2,753 deaths, including 52 non-residents.
Broward County: 1,190 additional cases and 2 more deaths. Broward has a known total of 224,546 cases and 2,769 deaths since the beginning of the pandemic. The death tally includes 46 nonresidents.
Miami-Dade County: 2,324 additional cases and 13 new deaths. The county now has 463,365 confirmed cases and 6,036 deaths, including 43 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 8.16% on Tuesday, up from 8.00% 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 111,942 COVID-19 tests of Florida residents received from labs in the past day, up from 20,705 results reported the day before.
The positivity rate has been rising in South Florida counties, particularly in Broward County.
Palm Beach County: Test results for 6,498 residents were reported Tuesday, leading to a daily positivity rate of 7.13%. That’s up from 6.99% the previous day.
Broward County: Test results for 14,256 residents were reported Tuesday, leading to a daily positivity rate of 8.25%. That’s up from 7.48% the previous day.
Miami-Dade County: Test results for 29,879 residents were reported Tuesday, leading to a daily positivity rate of 7.76%. That’s down from 9.00% the previous day.
Deaths
The numbers of hospitalized COVID-19 patients and deaths in South Florida have declined.
The state’s pandemic data report shows a total of 34,120 Floridians have died from COVID-19. In addition, 664 nonresidents have died after contracting the virus. Most of the fatalities reported Tuesday 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. 23 for deaths per 100K residents and No. 16 for cases per 100K residents, according to the latest data from the health department and the COVID Tracking Project.
Hospitalizations
As of Tuesday, there were 3,234 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 465, Palm Beach County had 206 and Miami-Dade had 601.
Hospitalizations hit a peak in late July of about 9,500 patients statewide.
Vaccines
More than 5.67 million people in Florida have received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine.
In Florida, 2,843,455 people have received their first dose of the vaccine, or about 13.24% of the population.
So far, 4,447,965 people have completed the series of doses required to be vaccinated. That represents about 20.71% of the population.