Jacob Ogles
Florida saw a higher jump in cases of COVID-19 on Wednesday than it has seen in two weeks.
The Department of Health in a daily update on the pandemic reported 6,790 new cases. That brings the total number of known infections since the virus surfaced here in March 2020 to 2,064,525.
That includes 2,026,083 Florida residents who tested positive over the past 13 months, along with 38,442 out-of-state residents who had tests for COVID-19 in the state.
Florida tallied results from an exceptional number of cases on Wednesday, 128,590 in total. Of those, 10,027 came back as positive. That’s a positivity rate of 7.8%.
Health officials consider the spread of the virus contained if that number remains under 10%, and while the positivity rate jumped just over that line on Sunday, the rate of positive results remained lower than that every other day since early February. The positivity rate on only new cases among Florida cases has remained consistently lower, and was 6.41% on Wednesday.
Florida also reported an additional 71 deaths since its Wednesday update. That brings the human toll of the virus in Florida to 34,143 dead. The total includes 33,494 Florida residents felled before recovering from the virus, along with 649 who lived elsewhere and were recovering in Florida when they died.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have not updated a report on variant coronavirus infections since Tuesday evening, when the federal agency said Florida had 2,351 instances of the B.1.1.7 variant, 49 cases of the P.1 mutation and 15 instances of the B.1.351 strain.
But health officials report more than 9 million doses of vaccine have been administered in the state of Florida, with 5,979,461 individuals receiving at least one shot in the Sunshine State.
Of those, 242,281 received the one-dose Johnson & Johnson shot. Another 3,156,575 have had two doses of the Moderna or Pfizer shots, thus completed the recommended regimen. Another 2,580,605 individuals have had the first dose of Pfizer or Moderna and await a recommended booster shot.
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, considers 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.
