Staff Reports
State health officials confirmed the deaths of 68 residents with COVID-19 in the last day, just one day after recording the lowest single-day death toll on Sunday since late June.
Sunday’s report showed just 15 new deaths.
Pandemic updates issued on Sunday and Monday typically include fewer new fatalities than reports issued Tuesday through Saturday. Sunday’s report offered hope the Sunshine State had rounded the corner past the worst of the pandemic, but Monday’s report shows a return to recent patterns.
While it’s a tick up, it’s still a further downward trend. Last Monday the state confirmed 72 new resident deaths. Earlier in the month, there were days with more than 200 deaths.
The largest increase to Florida’s death toll came Aug. 11 when it grew by 276. Over the last seven days, the death toll has grown by an average of 114 residents each day.
Overall, 11,187 Florida residents have died with COVID-19. Another 144 non-Floridians have died, no change from Saturday or Sunday.
The lowest death toll since cases began spiking again this summer came on June 22, when 12 residents died. That was the same day Florida passed 100,000 COVID-19 cases.
With 1,885 cases confirmed since Sunday’s report, now 623,471 people have tested positive for the virus, including 616,629 residents. The median age of positive cases dropped from 43 Sunday to 41 Monday.
Florida’s testing positivity rate ticked up slightly Sunday after 5.52% of those tested returned positive, up from 5.2% the day before. The seven-day daily positivity average stayed statistically unchanged at 5.8%, down from 5.9% in Saturday’s report.
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.
But despite the positivity rate falling below 10% and flirting with a 5% average, Gov. Ron DeSantis has stopped emphasizing the rate and is instead pointing to emergency department metrics. 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. For the week of Aug. 16, those visits dropped to 1,889 and 3,559 respectively for a seventh consecutive week of decline.
Overall, 38,495 Floridians have been hospitalized, an increase of 85 since Sunday’s report. But the Agency for Health Care Administration reports that 3,735 people are currently hospitalized with the disease, down 56 from 24 hours earlier and the lowest since the agency began reporting that metric.
DOH has received results from 4.6 million Floridians and 19,502 non-residents tested for the virus. Among those tested were 39,507 individuals tested Sunday, down from more than 60,000 tested Saturday.
As schools reopen, DOH is tracking cases in the state’s youth. But the department hasn’t updated the report since Wednesday. That report showed a total of 48,928 cases among children 17 and younger.
That followed the department removing a separate report on schools and higher education institutions Tuesday, according to the Florida Times-Union.
The last of those reports, published last Monday, showed 206 cases associated with daycares, including 121 people 18 years old or older. For primary and secondary schools, that count was 559, including 370 older than 18. In post-secondary schools, DOH had identified 155 cases.
The youngest person to die in Florida was a 6-year-old Hillsborough County girl whose death the state reported on Friday.
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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.
