Ryan Nicol
South Florida’s tri-county area has now seen more than 9,600 people die after contracting the coronavirus, setting a grim mark as the state and nation continue to ramp up vaccine distribution.
Florida inched close to that total Wednesday, when the state documented 31 new COVID-19 deaths. Thursday’s Department of Health report showed another 43 deaths across Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach counties. That puts the tri-county area at 9,601 COVID-19 deaths since the pandemic began.
Thursday’s death toll is also the 19th day out of the past 21 days the region has seen at least 30 deaths, though the COVID-19 infection rate does continue to fall.
Hospitalizations are rising in Palm Beach week-to-week, almost as fast as they are falling in Miami-Dade County. Daily hospitalizations have dropped by more than half in Miami-Dade since mid-January, when they hovered around 50 per day. That metric sits at 24 per day over the last week.
Palm Beach has seen an average of 23 hospitalizations per day over that span, putting it about even with Miami-Dade, despite having just over half of Miami-Dade’s population. That’s despite the fact that the vaccine rollout has also been more successful among Palm Beach’s elderly community than in Miami-Dade. Almost half of Palm Beach’s elderly population has been vaccinated, compared to around a quarter in Miami-Dade.
Broward has seen the highest hospitalization levels in the region over the past week, at around 27 per day. That number has largely been steady over the last few weeks.
The region recorded 3,168 new COVID-19 cases Thursday, putting the tri-county area near 685,000 in total since the start of the outbreak. The case positivity rate, which measures how many tests are coming back positive, continues to drop, however. That number is now below 7% in each county, showing the virus’s current spread is slowing.
As the death and hospitalization numbers make clear, that doesn’t mean the region is out of the woods yet. Here are some of the weekly numbers for the previous three weeks throughout the South Florida tri-county area:
Miami-Dade
— Jan. 21-27: 39 newly-reported hospitalizations per day, 22 newly-reported deaths per day, 1,938 new confirmed cases per day, 8% positivity rate
— Jan. 28-Feb. 3: 34 newly-reported hospitalizations per day, 21 newly-reported deaths per day, 1,674 new confirmed cases per day, 7.6% positivity rate
— Feb. 4-10: 24 newly-reported hospitalizations per day, 20 newly-reported deaths per day, 1,595 new confirmed cases per day, 6.9% positivity rate
Broward
— Jan. 21-27: 24 newly-reported hospitalizations per day, 9 newly-reported deaths per day, 988 new confirmed cases per day, 8.3% positivity rate
— Jan. 28-Feb. 3: 27 newly-reported hospitalizations per day, 10 newly-reported deaths per day, 912 new confirmed cases per day, 7.9% positivity rate
— Feb. 4-10: 27 newly-reported hospitalizations per day, 11 newly-reported deaths per day, 891 new confirmed cases per day, 6.8% positivity rate
Palm Beach
— Jan. 21-27: 15 newly-reported hospitalizations per day, 12 newly-reported deaths per day, 657 new confirmed cases per day, 8.5% positivity rate
— Jan. 28-Feb. 3: 16 newly-reported hospitalizations per day, 12 newly-reported deaths per day, 630 new confirmed cases per day, 8% positivity rate
— Feb. 4-10: 23 newly-reported hospitalizations per day, 9 newly-reported deaths per day, 520 new confirmed cases per day, 6.4% positivity rate
