Admittance up 68%, but beds are available

COVID-19 hospitalizations in Florida are up almost 68% in the past four weeks — 123% in Miami-Dade County alone — but the state is not facing bed shortages like other parts of the country with a surge of infected people.

The U.S. on Friday hit a record with 101,276 patients now hospitalized with a coronavirus diagnosis, according to The COVID Tracking Project. Officials in California, Arizona, Indiana and other

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 7.32% on Saturday, down from 7.49% 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 140,527 COVID-19 tests of Florida residents received from labs in the past day, up from 133,598 results reported the day before.

Palm Beach County: Test results for 9,788 residents were reported Saturday, leading to a daily positivity rate of 6.44%. That’s down from 6.79% the previous day.

Broward County: Test results for 14,331 residents were reported Saturday, leading to a daily positivity rate of 7.67%. That’s up from 7.41% the previous day.

Miami-Dade County:

Test results for 27,590 residents were reported Saturday, leading to a daily positivity rate of 8.05%. That’s down from 8.18% the previous day.

Deaths

The state’s pandemic data report shows a total of 19,084 Floridians have died from COVID-19. In addition, 243 nonresidents have died after contracting the virus.

Most of the fatalities reported Saturday happened over several weeks but were just confirmed in the past day.

Hospitalizations

As of Saturday, there were 4,335 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 442, Palm Beach County had 275 and Miami-Dade had 744.

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.