Fewer than 3K people test positive for COVID-19 as testing reaches recent low

For the first time since June, fewer than 3,000 people tested positive for COVID-19 in Florida over the course of a single day.

State health officials confirmed 2,678 new COVID-19 cases since Sunday’s report as testing also reached a new low since the start of the summer. Overall, officials have diagnosed 576,094 people, including 6,070 non-Florida residents, in the Sunshine State.

Monday’s report was a few hours behind schedule, but good signs continued.

For a sixth consecutive day, the positivity rate was in the single digits — 8.3% Sunday. That’s if you accept the Department of Health’s revision to Tuesday’s positivity rate. The seven-day average fell again to 8.7%.

The new cases cover residents and non-residents confirmed positive Sunday morning to Monday morning. For all day Sunday, the state diagnosed 2,760 positive residents, the median age of whom was 44.

Together with the depressed positivity rate, officials received only 39,158 test results. Through Monday morning, 4.2 million Floridians have been tested, as have 19,000 non-residents in the state.

In the last 24 hours, officials confirmed the deaths of 87 residents, raising the state’s death toll to 9,539 residents plus 135 non-residents. Twelve of those individuals confirmed in the new report died Aug. 6, but newly reported deaths date back as far as July 27.

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.

And emergency department visits, which Gov. Ron DeSantis now says is a more accurate indicator, continued their decline.

Several indicators, like diagnoses or the positivity rate require “looking under the hood,” he added.

“Whether people are showing up at the ED or not, that’s just a fact,” DeSantis said. “If people are showing up in higher numbers, there’s more prevalence. When they’re showing up in much lower numbers, that’s a sign that the prevalence has abated.”

The week of July 5 saw 6,255 emergency department visits with flu-like illnesses and 15,999 for illnesses like COVID-19. For the week of Aug. 9, those visits dropped to 2,187 and 4,835 respectively.

With 266 new resident hospitalizations, 34,194 people have been hospitalized. But the Agency for Health Care Administration reports 5,631 people are currently hospitalized with the disease, down 74 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.