Florida records 10th straight day of single-digit COVID-19 positivity rates

Image via AP.

The COVID-19 testing positivity rate continues to decline in Florida as the Sunshine State passed its 10th consecutive day with a rate below 10%.

State health officials diagnosed 4,684 new cases in Florida, raising the overall case count to 593,286. Of those, 587,023 are Florida residents while 6,263 are non-residents.

With Thursday’s 6.8% positivity rate, the seven-day average percent positivity rate fell from 7.6% to 7.4%. Ten percent is the state’s self-imposed target threshold.

The new cases cover residents and non-residents confirmed positive Thursday morning to Friday morning. For all-day Thursday, the state diagnosed 4,730 positive residents, with a median age of 43.

On Thursday, the Department of Health reported that it had confirmed the 10,000th death of a Florida resident. As of Friday, 10,168 Floridians have died after the department confirmed 122 more and removed three.

Of those newly-confirmed deaths, 11 occurred outside the last 30 days and beyond the scope of the report’s timeline. Of those visible new fatalities, 21 occurred on Wednesday.

Daily deaths appear to have plateaued, with officials confirming an average 162 dead residents over the past seven days. That’s down from a seven-day average of 181 on Sunday and 185 earlier in the month.

The state also removed one non-resident from the death toll. On top of the 10,168 resident deaths, 136 non-residents have died in the state.

But deaths are also a lagging indicator of the pandemic. Deaths can occur weeks after someone tests positive, and people testing positive were likely infected a week or more prior.

After pointing to positivity rates as one sign that the pandemic was improving in May, Gov. Ron DeSantis began highlighting emergency department visits as his preferred metric.

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.

And while 347 additional residents were confirmed in hospitals, the statewide hospital census has been declining.

Overall, 35,997 people have been hospitalized. But the Agency for Health Care Administration reports 4,942 people are currently hospitalized with the disease, down 398 from 24 hours earlier.

Together with the depressed positivity rate, officials received 79,260 test results. Through Thursday morning, 4.4 million Floridians have been tested, as have 19,000 non-residents in the state.

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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, consider 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.