Experts say the sheer number of new cases makes it likely that Florida’s flat death toll will take off again.

Experts say number of new cases makes that outcome likely

The real impact of the record-breaking coronavirus totals for Florida will start to arrive in mid-July, with hospitalizations, recoveries and funerals.

Although the disease may be killing a smaller percentage of its victims, experts say the sheer number of new cases makes it likely that Florida’s flat death toll will take off again.

“I’m concerned going forward that we’re going to see a lot more deaths,” said Dr. Mary Jo Trepka, head of the epidemiology department at Florida International University.

Florida posted 8,942 new cases Friday, blowing past the previous record of 5,511. The daily death toll peaked two months ago at 83 and since then has held steady in the range of 40 or 50 per day. Friday brought 41 more deaths.

But with Florida, Arizona, Texas and several other states posting skyrocketing case counts, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, says higher daily death tolls are likely to follow.

“There are more cases. There are more hospitalizations in some of those places and soon you’ll be seeing more deaths,” Fauci said in an interview Friday on CNBC. “Even though the deaths are coming down as a country, that doesn’t mean that you’re not going to start seeing them coming up now.”

Even though the disease is striking younger people who are more likely to survive it, he said they will go on to infect others.

“Then you start seeing greater hospitalizations and deaths,” Fauci said. “It may take a few weeks, but we’ll see that, and that’s my concern.”

Calculating the death rate is not a simple matter. Of the 122,960 people who tested positive in Florida, 3,464 have died. This would appear to yield a death rate of 2.8%.

But there are issues with that figure, said José Szapocznik, an epidemiologist at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine.

That death rate is inflated by the toll the disease took on the elderly early in the epidemic, he said. The disease has shifted to younger, healthier people, who are more likely to survive. And doctors have become better at treating it.

Many people who get the disease could go undiagnosed, he said, and people who die from it could also be missed.

Since there is a time lag of three or four weeks between diagnosis and death, he said, it’s clearly too soon for this week’s recordbreaking numbers for new cases to be reflected in the tally of deaths.

“We know that deaths are a lagging indicator,” he said. “The deaths that we’re seeing now are from infections from three or four weeks ago. So it’s possible it’s going to go up.”

So it’s unclear what percentage of people diagnosed in this record-breaking week will die. But their prospects have improved and are likely to continue to improve as doctors learn what works in treating the disease.

“It’s a really good thing that we closed down in March and April because that has given the healthcare system time to improve their treatments, and so outcomes are better,” said Dr. Trepka, of FIU. “We may see continued improvement in the future in treatment. So if you’re going to get Covid-19, it would be better to get it six months from now because presumably we’ll have better treatments.”