Staff Reports
State health officials on Saturday reported 3,656 COVID-19 diagnoses and 62 fatalities among residents tied to the virus, a continuation of favorable trends for Florida.
The Department of Health now shows that 643,867 people, including 636,653 Floridians, have tested positive for the novel coronavirus in the Sunshine State. With the newly confirmed deaths, 11,963 people have died in Florida, including 11,811 residents.
Those updates come in the 24 hours since DOH and the Division of Emergency Management released their previous report Friday morning.
Over the last seven days, the death toll has grown by an average of 101 residents, down from a peak average of 185 nearly a month ago.
The new cases cover results returned between Friday morning and Saturday morning. For all-day Friday, DOH received 3,773 positive cases with a median age of 36, a drop from a recent high of 46 as schools and universities reopen.
The fastest-growing age cohort for the virus is Floridians aged 15 to 24. Of those positive cases from Friday, 1,009 — or 27% — of all positives came from that age group. Seven days prior, 482 of the 3,207 positive cases — or 15% — came from that age group.
That continued a trend that 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.
Before the recent uptick, the share of new cases was roughly evenly distributed across those aged 15 to 64, spanning five age cohorts. The number of new cases aged 15 to 24 is now more than double that of the next-closest age cohort.
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, 39,912 Floridians have been hospitalized, an increase of 245 since Friday’s report. But the Agency for Health Care Administration reports that 3,234 people are currently hospitalized with the disease, down 130 from Friday afternoon, and the lowest since the agency began reporting that metric.
In total, 4.8 million Floridians have been tested for COVID-19, as have 19,896 nonresidents in the state. On Friday, DOH received 70,024 test results.
The positivity rate Friday rose from 5.1% to 6%. Over the last seven days, each day’s positivity rate has averaged 5.5%.
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 nonresidents 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.
