State adds 7,296 cases, 92 more deaths

Florida reported 7,296 new coronavirus cases on Friday and another 92 new resident deaths linked to COVID-19. The state has now reported 2,155,744 cases since the pandemic began.

South Florida

Palm Beach County: 511 additional cases and 7 more deaths. The county now has 138,063 confirmed cases and 2,767 deaths, including 52 non-residents.

Broward County: 936 additional cases and 21 more deaths. Broward has a known total of 226,990 cases and 2,809 deaths since the beginning of the pandemic. The death tally includes 47 non-residents.

Miami-Dade County: 1,464 additional cases and 15 new deaths. The county now has 467,464 confirmed cases and 6,073 deaths, including 44 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 6.83% on Friday, up from 6.66% 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 106,502 COVID-19 tests of Florida residents received from labs in the past day, up from 101,372 results reported the day before.

Palm Beach County: Test results for 8,334 residents were reported Friday, leading to a daily positivity rate of 6.12%. That’s up from 5.66% the previous day.

Broward County: Test results for 13,268 residents were reported Friday, leading to a daily positivity rate of 7.12%. That’s up from 6.08% the previous day.

Miami-Dade County: Test results for 21,553 residents were reported Friday, leading to a daily positivity rate of 6.71%. That’s down from 7.22% the previous day.

Deaths

The state’s pandemic data report shows a total of 34,330 Floridians have died from COVID-19. In addition, 670 non-residents have died after contracting the virus. Most of the fatalities reported Friday 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 Friday, there were 3,264 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 502, Palm Beach County had 199 and Miami-Dade had 598.

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 vaccine.

In Florida, 2,920,659 people have received their first dose of the vaccine, or about 13.60% of the population. So far, 4,779,216 people have completed the series of doses required to be vaccinated. That represents about 22.25% of the population.