Down again: COVID numbers continue to decline in Florida

COVID-19 cases continue to drop across Florida as the latest wave of infections, driven by omicron subvariants, continues to recede, according to fresh data from the state and federal governments.

The Florida Department of Health’s biweekly COVID report, published Friday, lists 11,296 new COVID cases weekly, on average, since Sept. 23. That’s the lowest since April 8.

The number of deaths from the respiratory disease followed the downward trend, with 261 new deaths weekly on average since Sept. 23. That's the lowest total since June 17.

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In the state's hospitals, doctors and nurses were tending to 1,609 COVID-positive patients statewide, the smallest number since May 17, according to the U.S. Health and Human Services Department.

Sewage readings from Miami-Dade, Palm Beach, Hillsborough, Pinellas, Orange and Seminole counties all show declining numbers of coronavirus particles in wastewater, according to test results those locales ship to Boston-based laboratory Biobot Analytics.

COVID has infected more than 7.1 million Floridians and killed at least 81,661. The death toll excludes more than 3,000 victims whom state auditors found by combing through records from 2020 in which physicians classified someone's cause of death as COVID, but the state Health Department did not.

The state Health Department reports more than 16 million Florida residents vaccinated against COVID, but that overcounts inoculations by hundreds of thousands because it includes out-of-staters erroneously entered into the tally as residents.

Overall, 72% of eligible Florida residents are fully vaccinated, a percentage that barely changed over the summer.

Meanwhile, a paper from three Yale University health and economics researchers has found that Republicans died more often than Democrats last year during the worst coronavirus surges. The study, released last week by the National Bureau of Economic Research, shows that Republican Party voters in Florida and Ohio have died far more often than Democrats despite widespread inoculation availability.

Using voter registration records, researchers counted 30% more deaths among registered Republicans during the summer 2021 coronavirus surge fueled by the pathogen’s delta variant, compared with the pre-pandemic time period of 2018 through early 2020. For Democrats, it was around 20%.

And during the close of 2021, the scientists again calculated an excess death rate of 30% for Republicans, 10% for Democrats. Researchers said they controlled for factors such as age and county of the victims.

Just 13% of Republicans already got the latest boosters, or plan to get them, a Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) survey in September found. About 32% of all adults said the same.

Those boosters, federally approved in late August, target subvariants of the virus’ omicron mutation. The offshoots have accounted for virtually all COVID infections this year so far, while the original vaccines from 2020 were designed for the viral strain from Wuhan, China.

Florida’s government, headed mostly by Republicans, has shown less interest in vaccinating people against the latest coronavirus strains compared to other large states, including the biggest GOP-led one.

Unlike Democratic-dominated California and New York, or GOP-dominated Texas, the Florida Department of Health has issued no news releases or posts on its Twitter or Facebook pages — combined audience, more than 114,000 — about the updated COVID booster shots.

The first thing visitors to the Texas Department of State Health Services’ web page and Twitter or Facebook pages is a large image announcing “Get Fully Vaccinated and Boosted Y’all!”

In addition to resisting immunization, Republicans are also less likely than everyone else to masking and facial covering rules meant to protect people from the airborne pathogen. About 30% of Republicans have said people should continue masking up in some public places, compared with 59% of all adults nationwide, KFF found in an April poll.

Also this week, two federal judges on a three-judge panel upheld a state law Gov. Ron DeSantis signed last year prohibiting cruise-ship companies from requiring passengers to show inoculation cards proving they’re immunized against the disease.

In the 55-page opinion issued Thursday by the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, Chief Judge William Pryor wrote that the panel overturned a lower court’s order pausing enforcement of the ban to prevent “discrimination” against the unvaccinated.

“Without this statute, unvaccinated Floridians risk being turned away from the businesses that make their lives possible — grocery stores, restaurants, fitness gyms, clothing stores, barber shops and hair salons, and even pharmacies,” Pryor wrote. Judge Andrew Brasher joined Pryor’s opinion.

Judge Robin Rosenbaum, a Democrat from Boca Raton, dissented in a 67-page opinion, saying Florida’s law “will facilitate the spread of COVID-19 onboard cruise ships by depriving cruise lines of the ability to verify passengers’ vaccination statuses.”

“People who are confined to beds and hospitals or who are otherwise unable to work because of the lingering effects of COVID-19 and long COVID,” Rosenbaum wrote. “Not to mention those who die from the virus — cannot participate in commerce as they would if they were not infected.”

Cruise companies sued the state last year to overturn the law. Pryor and Brasher were appointed by former President Donald Trump.

Chris Persaud is The Palm Beach Post's data reporter. Email him at cpersaud@pbpost.com.

This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: COVID-19 cases continue decline in Florida, new data shows