11,384 new cases, 120 more deaths

State has now reported more than 1M cases

Florida reported 11,384 new coronavirus cases on Wednesday and another 120 new resident deaths linked to COVID-19. The state has now reported 1,234,399 cases since the pandemic began.

South Florida

Palm Beach County: 444 additional cases and 7 more deaths. The county now has 78,187 confirmed cases and 1,870 deaths, including 28 non-residents.

Broward County: 934 additional cases and 4 more deaths. Broward has a known total of 129,897 cases and 1,826 deaths since the beginning of the pandemic. The death tally includes 30 non-residents.

Miami-Dade County: 2,243 additional cases and 1 new deaths. The county now has 280,982 confirmed cases and 4,121 deaths, including 25 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 8.59% on Wednesday, down from 8.76% 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 128,723 COVID-19 tests of Florida residents received from labs in the past day, up from 117,301 results reported the day before.

Palm Beach County: Test results for 5,801 residents were reported Wednesday, leading to a daily positivity rate of 7.43%. That’s up from 7.14% the previous day.

Broward County: Test results for 14,466 residents were reported Wednesday, leading to a daily positivity rate of 6.40%. That’s up from 6.25% the previous day.

Miami-Dade County: Test results for 29,167 residents were reported Wednesday, leading to a daily positivity rate of 7.44%. That’ s down from 8.51% the previous day.

Deaths

The state’s pandemic data report shows a total of 20,874 Floridians have died from COVID-19. In addition, 299 non-residents have died after contracting the virus. Most of the fatalities reported Wednesday happened over several weeks but were just confirmed in the past day.

Hospitalizations

As of Saturday, there were 5,092 people hospitalized in Florida with a primary diagnosis of COVID-19, according to the state Agency for Health Care Administration.

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.