Jacob Ogles
Florida health officials reported nearly 8,000 new COVID-19 infections Thursday as the state’s total caseload soared past 2.1 million.
The Department of Health’s daily update on the pandemic shows Florida has reached 2,104,686 known cases of coronavirus. That total dates back to when the virus surfaced in the state more than 13 months ago. It’s a leap of 7,939 cases since Wednesday’s data release.
The total includes 2,065,122 cases involving Florida residents and 39,564 out-of-state residents tested here.
Also in the total are 34,562 cases with fatal outcomes, a leap of 86 reported deaths overnight. That includes 33,906 Florida residents who never recovered after testing positive, and 656 individuals who died in Florida from pandemic-related causes.
The spike in cases came as Florida on Wednesday processed results for 141,380 COVID-19 tests, the largest pile of results added to state databases in more than two weeks. Of those tests, 11,607 tests, or 8.21%.
Health officials generally consider the spread of the disease under control so long as positivity rates remain below 10%. The threshold has been exceeded twice in the past two weeks, both on Sundays when a relatively low number of tests were processed.
There’s no update yet to Florida cases of variant virus mutations from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which plans to next update its national dashboard Thursday evening by 7 p.m. As of Tuesday evening, Florida had 3,192 cases of the B.1.1.7 strain, 84 cases of the P.1 mutation and 25 instances of the B.1.351 variant.
State officials say Florida has now administered vaccines to 6,786,461 individuals, a jump of 156,354 since midday Wednesday.
That includes 369,733 who received the single-dose Johnson & Johnson vaccine. Another 3,683,864 have completed both required shots for the Pfizer or Moderna vaccine.
There are also 2,732,864 individuals who have received a first dose of Moderna or Pfizer and still need a second 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.
