Staff Reports
On the eighth day with COVID-19 positivity rates coming in above 5%, state health officials confirmed the 17,000th death related to the coronavirus in Florida.
The Department of Health confirmed 53 deaths in an update Friday, raising the death toll among Florida residents to 17,014. Another 210 nonresidents have also died in the state.
DOH also confirmed 5,245 additional diagnoses since Thursday’s report, raising the lifetime count of cases in the state to 832,625, including 11,099 nonresidents.
The latest data includes cases detailed between Thursday morning and Friday morning. For all day Thursday, officials counted 5,195 cases among residents from 89,359 individuals tested. Among the new positives, the median age was 37.
The positivity rate was 6.4% Thursday, up slightly a day after it had fallen from 7.7% to 6.2%. Some experts say a community should maintain rates below 5% for 14 days before reopening services like schools.
For weeks, the Governor’s Office has acknowledged an uptick in the number of new positives, but Gov. Ron DeSantis has emphasized that Florida will keep its reopening course. Before the uptick in positivity rates, the Governor’s communications director, Fred Piccolo, told Florida Politics that newly available rapid tests could be inspiring interest in testing. But he also acknowledged Phase Three and the full reopening of restaurants as probable factors driving an increase in cases.
New cases have increased across the country, particularly in the Midwest, and the nation has seen record-setting days for new infections.
In Florida, DeSantis has shifted the state’s data focus away from the raw count and percent positivity rates, instead, pointing to hospital visits with symptoms related to COVID-19 as his preferred metric.
Four weeks ago, the Department of Health reported its first week-over increase in hospital visits since the week of July 5, when visits peaked at 15,999. Last week, the state showed initially visits falling to 4,467 the week prior, but that has since been revised to 5,242
Last week, visits fell again to 4,828.
As of Thursday, 50,265 Floridians have been hospitalized after DOH recorded 188 new hospitalizations. The Agency for Health Care Administration reports that 2,564 people are currently hospitalized with the disease, an increase in over recent weeks and an increase of 41 since about 24 hours earlier.
_____
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.
