Kelly Hayes
The Sunshine State is continuing to report gloomy numbers in its latest set of COVID-19 data.
Florida has now reported 35,074 deaths related to COVID-19, a number that includes 34,404 residents and 670 non-residents who died in the state.
While the state crossed the landmark on Friday, the Florida Department of Health released the data on Saturday, which showed 74 new deaths and 187 additional hospitalizations.
Florida also confirmed an additional 6,341 cases of COVID-19 on Friday. This follows a trend of consistently higher numbers of new cases seen by the state in the past week, including a jump of 9,098 cases from Monday to Tuesday.
But the mid-week report showed the positivity rate for the first time this week had dropped below 10% — a good sign. That’s the threshold for which health officials consider the spread of the virus out of control.
On Friday, 111,299 COVID-19 tests were processed statewide and 9,717 of those, or 8.73%, came back positive.
Florida still leads the nation in two types of mutated coronavirus cases. There are 3,510 cases of the B.1.1.7 strain that first surfaced in the United Kingdom and 126 instanced of the P.1 virus discovered in Brazil. There are also 27 cases of the B.1.351 strain out of South Africa.
Since the start of the pandemic, the state has seen 2,162,067 total cases of the virus.
About 33% of the state has been vaccinated, with 7,934,016 Floridians having received at least one shot. Of those, 5,012,332 have been fully vaccinated against the virus, leaving only 2,921,684 who are still waiting on their second shot.
The state reported vaccinating 82,800 individuals on Friday alone, including 42,276 who are now completely vaccinated.
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.
