Kelly Hayes
The Sunshine State has now seen 8,016,441 individuals get at least one shot of a COVID-19 vaccine.
The state hit the milestone Saturday, after vaccinating 50,720 people, including 24,493 who received a final shot. The Florida Department of Health released the data on Sunday in its daily vaccination report.
Of the more than 8 million who have received a shot, 5,080,273 are fully vaccinated against the virus, leaving 2,936,168 waiting on a second dose of either the Pfizer or Moderna vaccine.
The strides in vaccinations come as the state continues to see high numbers of daily new cases.
On Saturday, the state confirmed another 6,473 new cases of COVID-19, making it the sixth consecutive day Florida has reported more than 6,000 new cases.
The state also reported 35 new deaths and 83 additional hospitalizations in the latest report. Since the start of the pandemic, Florida has recorded 2,168,901 cases of COVID-19, and 35,109 deaths.
Florida’s positivity rate saw a spike on Saturday, hitting 10% — the threshold for which health officials consider the spread of the virus out of control. Of the 89,716 COVID-19 tests that were processed statewide, 8,999 of those, or 10.03%, came back positive.
Florida also 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.
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.
