Florida confirms 3,198 COVID-19 cases and 104 residents deaths

State health officials confirmed 3,198 COVID-19 diagnoses and 104 fatalities among residents tied to the virus.

The Department of Health now shows that 640,211 people, including 633,060 Floridians, have tested positive for the novel coronavirus in the Sunshine State. With the newly confirmed deaths, 11,903 people have died in Florida, including 11,750 residents.

Those updates come in the 24 hours since DOH and the Division of Emergency Management released their latest report Thursday morning.

Over the last seven days, the death toll has grown by an average of 113 residents, down from a peak average of 185 nearly a month ago.

The new cases cover results returned between Thursday morning and Friday morning. For all-day Thursday, DOH received 3,259 positive cases with a median age of 39, a drop from a recent high of 46.

The fastest-growing age cohort for the virus are Floridians aged 15 to 24. Of those positive cases from Thursday, 772 — or 24% — of all positives came from that age group. Seven days prior, 557 of the 3,849 positive cases — or 14% — came from that age group.

That continued a trend that looks like it began this month. In the past week, other age cohorts have remained mostly stable with no one group rising above 17% of the share of new cases.

The summer Sunbelt COVID-19 resurgence was precipitated by a surge in COVID-19 cases among younger Floridians. In June, Gov. Ron DeSantis pointed to a dramatic drop in the median age of positive cases from the 50s to the mid and low 30s.

For Thursday, people aged 25 to 34 made up 14% of new cases. Those 35 to 44 were 12% of cases, those 45 to 54 were 13% and those 55 to 64 were also 13%.

DeSantis will attend the Santa Fe Raiders versus Suwannee Bulldogs football game at Suwannee High School Friday evening. The Governor has been a proponent of reopening high schools and both high school and college sports.

On Tuesday, DOH and the DEM 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,” 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, 39,667 Floridians have been hospitalized, an increase of 239 since Thursday’s report. But the Agency for Health Care Administration reports that 3,364 people are currently hospitalized with the disease, down 61 from Thursday morning and the lowest since the agency began reporting that metric.

In total, 4.7 million Floridians have been tested for COVID-19, as have 19,832 non-residents in the state. On Thursday, DOH received 71,115 test results.

The positivity rate Thursday fell from 6.2% to 5.1%. Over the last seven days, each day’s positivity rate has averaged 5.4%.

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.

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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.