3,571 new COVID-19 cases reported in Florida as deaths jump by 149

State health officials confirmed 3,571 COVID-19 diagnoses Thursday as the death toll increased by 149.

The Department of Health now shows that 637,013 people, including 629,913 Floridians, have tested positive for the novel coronavirus in the Sunshine State. With the newly confirmed deaths, 11,800 people have died in Florida, including 11,650 residents.

Those updates come in the 24 hours since DOH and the Division of Emergency Management released their latest report Wednesday morning. The agencies have yet released their daily report, but DOH has updated its dashboard with the numbers.

Over the last seven days, the death toll has grown by an average of 112 residents, down from a peak average of 185 nearly a month ago.

The new cases cover results returned between Wednesday morning and Thursday morning. For all-day Wednesday, DOH received 3,646 positive results.

On Tuesday, the department and the Division of Emergency management announced they had cut ties with Quest Diagnostics, one of the state’s largest private testing labs, over repeated data backlogs. The issue came to a head Monday evening when Quest added 3,870 positive cases from nearly 75,000 unreported results dating back to late April.

“The law requires all COVID-19 results to be reported to DOH in a timely manner,” Gov. Ron DeSantis said. “To drop this much unusable and stale data is irresponsible. I believe that Quest has abdicated their ability to perform a testing function in Florida that the people can be confident in.”

The incident marks the second time the department has placed an asterisk over a day’s results. Last month, DOH noted a batch of data released by Niznik Lab Corp, prompting the stricter enforcement.

Because of inconsistent reporting and the lag times for confirming cases, DeSantis has shifted his focus to emergency department visits.

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, 39,428 Floridians have been hospitalized, an increase of 270 since Tuesday’s report. But the Agency for Health Care Administration reports that 3,425 people are currently hospitalized with the disease, down 104 from 24 hours earlier and the lowest since the agency began reporting that metric.

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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.