Florida records fifth straight day of single-digit COVID-19 positivity rates

For five consecutive days, state health officials have reported COVID-19 testing positivity rates below the state’s self-imposed 10% target threshold.

That’s true if you accept the asterisk placed on data from Tuesday, when the Department of Health received a backlog of results from one private lab dating back to before the pandemic’s peak. Instead of 11.9%, health officials say Tuesday’s data should read 9.4%.

The seven-day average positivity rate, which helps eliminate spikes in the data, fell to 8.8% with the 7.8% reported for Saturday.

Sunday’s data report also included 3,779 new cases, 107 deaths and 267 hospitalizations. All three metrics shrank compared to Saturday’s report, but reports on Sundays and Mondays, which mostly include weekend data, typically include fewer cases, deaths and hospitalizations than the other five days of the week.

Since the first Floridians tested positive on March 1, 573,416 individuals have tested positive in the state. That includes 6,041 non-Florida residents.

The new cases cover residents and non-residents confirmed positive Saturday morning to Sunday morning. For all day Saturday, the state diagnosed 3,899 positive residents, the median age of whom was 44.

Together with the depressed positivity rate, officials received only 58,229 test results. Through Sunday morning, 4.2 million Floridians have been tested, as have 19,000 non-residents in the state.

The state’s death toll also ticked up to 9,452, including an additional 135 non-residents who have died in the Sunshine State.

In the last 30 days, July 20 was the deadliest day of the pandemic with 178 fatalities. Of the 107 fatalities confirmed in the last 24 hours, 25 of them occurred on Aug. 4.

With the 267 new resident hospitalizations, 33,928 people have been hospitalized. But the Agency for Health Care Administration reports 5,705 people are currently hospitalized with the disease, up 20 from 24 hours earlier.

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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.