Another 8,560 people have come down with COVID-19 in Florida, marking the third consecutive day of at least 8,000 new cases being identified statewide, according to the latest state reports on the coronavirus pandemic.
That brings Florida’s total to 141,075 total cases of the disease since the coronavirus outbreak began in March, with more than 40,000 of those cases being confirmed just in the past six days, according to the latest COVID-19 report released Sunday morning by the Florida Department of Health.
Gov. Ron DeSantis has called a press conference Sunday afternoon in Pensacola to discuss the COVID-19 outbreak, which continues at previously unseen levels over the past week.
The latest count of new cases was lower than the record 9,585 tallied in Saturday’s report, and previous record 8,942 reported confirmed on Friday. But prior to Friday there never had been 6,000 confirmed cases reported in a single day in Florida.
At the same time, the positive-test rate ticked up slightly across the state in Sunday’s report, compared with Saturday’s. In the batch of 71,195 coronavirus test results that were returned on Saturday, 13.9% came back positive for the virus. In Saturday’s report, covering Friday’s batch, 11.3% of 78,345 results were positive.
Saturday was the sixth consecutive day that at least 10% of the test results were positive, and the 11th time in the past 12 days.
The latest report says that another 29 people have died in Florida of COVID-19, bringing the diseases’s death toll in the state to 3,419. Another 108 people had to be hospitalized in Florida, according to the report.
The outbreak continued to be worst in a handful of Florida’s biggest counties: those with Miami, Orlando, Tampa, and Jacksonville.
In Miami-Dade County, 2,152 new cases were counted in Sunday’s report, bringing the county’s total to 33,714.
In Orange County, 834 new cases were counted, bringing the county’s total to 9,671 cases in four months.
Hillsborough’s caseload increased by 788 cases in the new report, to a total of 9,918.
Duval County added 740 new cases in the latest report, giving it 5,588 total.
Broward County added 574 new cases; Palm Beach County, 461; and Pinellas County, 307.
