184 Floridians confirmed dead in latest COVID-19 report

State health officials have confirmed the deaths of 184 Floridians in the last 24 hours, raising the state’s death toll to 10,580.

That’s more deaths than officials confirmed on Sunday and Monday combined. But those deaths bring the daily death toll average over seven days below 120, the lowest it’s been since late July.

While officials confirmed 184 deaths in Tuesday’s report, they also removed one fatality, leaving an overall death toll increase of 183. Additionally, 137 non-residents have died in the state.

The Department of Health’s latest report also brought 2,673 diagnoses, raising the state’s case count to 605,502, including 599,176 Florida residents.

The new cases cover residents and non-residents confirmed positive Monday morning to Tuesday morning. For all-day Monday, the state diagnosed 2,770 positive residents, who had a median age of 44.

Florida’s testing positivity rate Monday spiked slightly from 5.2% to 7.5%. However, the overall trend has been a declining positivity rate. The seven-day average positivity rate remained 6.3% after Tuesday’s report.

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

DOH received results Monday from 43,524 individuals. The department has received results for 4.5 million Floridians and 19,000 non-residents.

Even though the testing positivity rate shows favorable signs, Gov. Ron DeSantis has stopped emphasizing that rate and is instead pointing to emergency department metrics as signs the pandemic is subsiding. Emergency department visits and the statewide hospital census, DeSantis says, offer realtime data and aren’t contingent on reporting from private testing labs.

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.

Overall, 37,038 Floridians have been hospitalized, an increase of 442 since Monday’s report. But the Agency for Health Care Administration reports that 4,543 people are currently hospitalized with the disease, down 109 from 24 hours earlier.

As schools reopen, DOH is tracking cases in the state’s youth. As of Tuesday, 48,730 Floridians 17 or younger have tested positive, 600 have been hospitalized and eight have died. The youngest person to die in Florida was a 6-year-old Hillsborough County girl whose death the state reported on Friday.

However, the department removed a separate report on schools and higher education institutions Tuesday after leaving it began publishing versions of it daily over the weekend, the Florida Times-Union reports.

On Monday, a Leon County Circuit Court Judge ruled in favor of the state’s teachers’ union, scrapping Education Commissioner Richard Corcoran‘s order that schools hold in-person lessons. The state is seeking an appeal in that case.

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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.