140 dead as Florida adds 9.8K new COVID-19 cases

New COVID-19 cases are south of 10,000 again Wednesday, but Florida saw its second-highest death toll from a single daily report with another 140 declared dead.

The Department of Health confirmed the deaths of 139 Floridians and one non-resident in the state, lifting the state’s death toll to 5,459. That includes 5,345 residents.

Among those confirmed dead was a 9-year-old girl from Putnam County, now the youngest person to die from COVID-19 in Florida. Previously, two 11-year-old residents were the youngest Floridians to die in the pandemic..

Wednesday morning’s report also includes 9,785 new cases. With now 379,619 diagnoses made in Florida, the state is primed to cross 400,000 cases by the end of the week.

The Sunshine State maintained the sub-10,000 caseload despite an increase in testing in part because the state saw its lowest percent positive rate in nearly a month. For Tuesday, 10.6% of people who were possible new cases received positive results. That continues a downward trend, but still above the state’s target 10% threshold.

The positivity rate statewide was below 3% in the second half of May.

During a Tuesday coronavirus briefing, President Donald Trump warned the pandemic could “get worse before it gets better. Even with positive signs on the testing front, Florida — which the President described as “flamelike” in his recent Fox News Sunday interview — faces an increasing mortality.

Deaths are a lagging indicator of the virus, and even though the latest peak in infections may be in the rearview mirror, fatalities are still ticking upward.

Officials confirmed 156 deaths in Thursday’s report, which still stands as the daily record high for fatalities.

The 9,785 new cases cover residents and non-residents confirmed positive Tuesday morning to Wednesday morning. For all day Tuesday, the state diagnosed 9,752 positive residents.

The median age of residents testing positive Tuesday hit 42, the oldest that metric has been since the state began reporting it daily.

The Department of Health has also counted an elevated number of hospitalizations, including 463 since Tuesday’s report to raise the state’s total to 22,243. That includes the 9,518 the Agency for Health Care Administration currently shows hospitalized with the disease, 82 more than about 24 hours earlier.

Nearly 3.2 million individuals have been tested in Florida, including 102,190 Tuesday. That’s down from the record 142,964 individuals set on July 11.

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Editor’s note on methodology: The Florida Department of Health releases new data every morning around 10:45 a.m. The total number reported in those daily reports include the previous day’s totals as well as the most up to date data as of about 9:30 a.m.

Florida Politics uses the report-over-report increase to document the number of new cases each day because it represents the most up-to-date data available. Some of the more specific data, including positivity rates and demographics, considers a different data set that includes only cases reported the previous day.

This is important to note because the DOH report lists different daily totals than our methodology to show day-over-day trends. Their numbers do not include non-residents who tested positive in the state and they only include single-day data, therefore some data in the DOH report may appear lower than what we report.

Our methodology was established based on careful consideration among our editorial staff to capture both the most recent and accurate trends.