Florida breaks record for last day of the year COVID cases

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Miami – The state of Florida, one of the hardest hit by the coronavirus pandemic, announced on Thursday that the record for coronavirus positives was broken on the last day of the year a week after the celebration of Christmas family reunions.

The Department of Health reported 17,192 new cases of coronavirus, far more than the 15,300 cases reported on July 12, when the state was in the worst of the first wave of the pandemic, as well as 127 new deaths from the disease.

These figures bring the total number of cases and deaths in the state to 1,323,315 and 21,990, respectively.

But today’s data doesn’t stand alone, but the average number of announced cases per day is around 12,700 in the past week.

This new wave of COVID-19 comes after Florida endured a terrible summer and broke national records when it recorded more than 15,000 cases in one day.

Since then, only California and Texas, the country’s two most populous states and the states most affected by global calculations from the US pandemic, have reported numbers above that 15,000 in one day.

The positivity rate for the nearly 166,000 tests conducted in the state this Wednesday was 11.57%, at a time when only 22% of hospital beds and 18% of intensive care unit beds were available.

Once again, the focus in Florida falls on Miami-Dade County, with 2,973 new cases in the past few hours, while the neighbor to the north, Broward County, added 1,572.

For example, South Florida, where 29% of Floridians live, represents 39.2% of cases with a total of 519,373 positives.

And the panorama nationally is not much better, with a record number of deaths recorded daily this week, with 3,740 on Wednesday, 15 more than the day before, according to independent data from Johns Hopkins University.

These figures confirm the fears of the country’s health authorities, who asked the population to avoid the gatherings of more than one family group during these December holidays to prevent the coronavirus from spreading even more after the wave of cases that followed. until Thanksgiving and from which they still hadn’t recovered.

The long-term hope lies in vaccines, and as of Thursday, more than 211,165 people had received them in Florida, 35,700 more than the day before.

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