72 deaths, 2K new COVID-19 cases as hopeful trends continue

Another 72 Floridians have died with COVID-19 as officials diagnosed another 2,258 cases ahead of Monday’s pandemic report.

On Sunday, the Department of Health (DOH) confirmed its 600,000th case. As of Monday’s report, 602,829 people have tested positive, including 6,318 non-Floridians in the state.

Meanwhile, California, the state with the most COVID-19 diagnoses, has more than 650,000 confirmed cases. Texas has more than 570,000 cases.

With the newly confirmed deaths, the state’s death toll rose to 10,397 residents. An additional 137 non-residents have died in the state.

An additional 128 residents were confirmed hospitalized, down from recent highs above 500 people. The statewide hospital census has been declining.

The 2,258 new cases cover residents and non-residents confirmed positive Sunday morning to Monday morning. For all-day Sunday, the state diagnosed 2,086 positive residents, who had a median age of 44.

DOH received results Sunday from 45,603 individuals. The testing positivity rate dropped to 5.2%, and the seven-day rolling average positivity rate fell from 6.7% to 6.3%.

Ten percent is the state’s self-imposed target threshold, but some medical experts have pointed to 5% as when services like schools could start reopening.

However, Gov. Ron DeSantis has stopped emphasizing the positivity rate and is instead pointing to emergency department metrics as signs the pandemic is subsiding.

Overall, 36,596 people have been hospitalized. But the Agency for Health Care Administration reports 4,652 people are currently hospitalized with the disease, up 74 from 24 hours earlier and a reversal from recent trends.

The number of patients hospitalized with the virus was halved in the past month, DeSantis tweeted Monday. Florida on Sunday also saw the lowest number of COVID-19 hospital admissions since June 18, he added.

The week of July 5 saw 6,255 emergency department visits with flu-like illnesses and 15,999 for illnesses like COVID-19. Last week, those visits dropped to 2,001 and 4,097 respectively.

Emergency department visits, DeSantis says, offer realtime data and aren’t contingent on reporting from private testing labs.

It took Florida 114 days to record its first 100,000 COVID-19 cases between March 1 and June 22. The next 400,000 cases took only 44 days. But with diagnoses slowing down this month, it took 18 days to confirm the next 100,000 and cross 600,000.

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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.