Jacob Ogles
As coronavirus cases in Florida climbed above 1,000, Southwest Florida suffered a concentration as great as some major cities.
That may come as no surprise to health officials as the first case in Florida was a Manatee County resident treated in a Sarasota hospital, and the first coronavirus death in Florida occurred in a Lee County hospital.
As of Sunday evening, 33 positive cases had been reported in Collier County, according to the Florida Department of Health. That includes four-non-residents who tested positive in the Naples area.
In Lee County, where two patients have now died after contracting COVID-19, there have been 26 cases, three of those non-residents.
Further north, Sarasota County has seen 17 positive cases, five non-residents, and Manatee has 13 cases.
And the region saw significant increases in rural patients as well, including the first cases in inland counties that don’t see a rush of domestic and international visitors flooding beaches in the spring.
Charlotte County has had two cases, and the first cases for Highlands and DeSoto counties were reported Sunday.
There’s been no reported coronavirus testing in Glades, Hendry or Hardee counties.
As for the 93 cases in the region, they range in age from as young as 17 to as old as 90. Of the patients, 34 have been hospitalized because of illness.
The region has felt a collective anxiety about coronavirus the longest. News of the first cases in Florida broke when a memo was released by Doctors Hospital of Sarasota that a patient there had been tested positive. That individual turned out to be a patient originally from Manatee County. But the test led to quarantines for staff and members of their families in the region. And the patient was the first known “community spread” patient, meaning they did not contract the virus traveling overseas.
In another dire Florida first, a Lee County patient became the first fatality of the virus in Florida, something physicians only learned after her death. A woman in her 70s was treated at Gulf Coast Medical Center and died a day before a test came back from the Department of Health confirming she had COVID-19.
Since that point, another Lee patient as well as one in Manatee have fallen ill. That means of the 13 to die in Florida from coronavirus, three were in Southwest Florida.
In a region with a median age well above the national average, that puts the mortality rate locally around 3.2%.
Still, the number of cases in the region is dwarfed by the more populous South Florida counties on the east coast. There, Miami-Dade County alone has had 227 cases — though notably no deaths.
But the in the Orlando area, Osceola County has had 24 cases, and Orange County had just 33, despite the presence of denser populations— not to mention several major theme parks.
