Florida reports over 4,000 new COVID-19 cases for third straight day

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — Florida health officials on Thursday said another 4,198 people in the state have tested positive for COVID-19, following the latest upward trend in the coronavirus pandemic.

This follows a tally of 4,115 new cases Wednesday and 4,298 infections Tuesday. The state has had at least 794,624 COVID-19 cases since official counts began in March.

While cases are up, testing positivity for new infections only dropped below 5%, according to the latest results for Florida residents. The 4.9% positivity reported Thursday followed three straight days above the level that experts say points to more virus spread.

The state Department of Health also reported that another 77 people have died from COVID-19. These fatalities mostly happened in recent weeks but were just reported to the state in the past day.

The overall toll is 16,854 deaths, which includes 206 nonresidents who died in the state.

These figures are under scrutiny. Florida officials last week said they are reviewing all pandemic deaths to ensure that the figures are correct, since some doctors are reporting them up to three months after the death.

Also, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently determined the true number of pandemic deaths could be up to 25% higher by including people who are listed as having died of other causes. This means up to 8,000 more people might have died as a result of the pandemic even if they weren’t infected or if their infections killed them without being detected.

Public health experts say the virus is considered under control when the COVID-19 test positivity rate is under 5%. “The higher the percent positive is, the more concerning it is,” say Johns Hopkins University epidemiologists. “As a rule of thumb, however, one threshold for the percent positive being ‘too high’ is 5%.”

Florida exceeds 5% by one of its two measures of assessing the rate.

In the first calculation, the state reported a daily positivity rate of 4.9% on Thursday, down from 5.42% on Wednesday. This method of calculating positivity counts new infections only, but also counts repeat negative tests.

In the second calculation, which includes retests of people who were previously diagnosed, the statewide daily positivity rate is 6.03% based on the latest results. That’s down from 6.49% the previous day.

Florida health data shows that almost 6.1 million people in Florida have been swabbed since March. Almost 5.3 million have tested negative. The overall positivity rate in that time is 13.03%.

According to the state, Thursday’s new case numbers reflect the results of 85,385 COVID-19 tests received from labs in the past day, up from 74,870 results reported Tuesday.

The number of people hospitalized in Florida for COVID-19 remained mostly unchanged in the past day.

As of Thursday afternoon, 2,348 people across the state were hospitalized with a primary diagnosis of COVID-19, up from 2,339 on Wednesday.

In South Florida, Broward County reported 205 patients hospitalized, a decrease of one from the previous day; Palm Beach County had 138, a decrease of two; and Miami-Dade had the most in the state with 338, an increase of 19.

The online report from the state Agency for Health Care Administration updates several times throughout the day. Hospitalizations hit a peak in late July of about 9,500 patients.

Since the pandemic began, 49,011 residents have been hospitalized for the disease, state health officials say.

Statewide: Thursday’s report shows a total of 16,648 Florida resident deaths. In addition, 206 non-resident deaths have been attributed to the virus.

Florida has the fourth-highest total of COVID-19 deaths among the states, after California, Texas and New York, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Florida’s COVID-19 death rate since the pandemic began is ninth among states, tied with Illinois, at 77 deaths per 100,000 people, the CDC reports. That’s higher than the national rate of 69 deaths per 100,000.

At least 6,720 deaths have occurred among residents and staff at nursing homes and assisted-living centers throughout Florida. That’s 32 additional deaths in the past day.

Almost 8.9 million people in the country have been infected with the novel coronavirus and 227,968 have died as of 12:30 p.m. EDT Thursday, according to Johns Hopkins University’s COVID-19 Dashboard.

Globally, at least 44.6 million people have tested positive for COVID-19 and 1,176,726 people have died from the disease, according to Johns Hopkins. The U.S. has had the most COVID-19 cases and deaths of any country.

The U.S. has 4.3% of the world’s population, but 19.9% of the world’s cases and 19.4% of the world’s deaths.

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©2020 Sun Sentinel (Fort Lauderdale, Fla.)

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