The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention effectively lifted indoor masking recommendations this week for all of Florida’s counties even as parts of the state are detecting spikes of coronavirus levels in their sewage.
Until Thursday, CDC officials classified 10 of Florida’s 67 counties as places where COVID-19 poses a high threat to hospitals, and therefore recommended residents wear masks indoors. Now that those counties — clustered near Alachua County and bordering Georgia — have been downgraded to medium-risk areas, no Floridians live in a county where federal health experts recommend indoor masking.
But some sewage systems in Florida detected an increase of the coronavirus’ genetic fragments in their wastewater systems between Feb. 28 and March 14, the CDC reports.
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Test results from Escambia County, home to Pensacola, revealed increases in viral particles. Three samples from Miami-Dade County showed the same thing. So did one of two samples from Pinellas County, home to St. Petersburg.
Two of three samples from Orange County, home to Orlando, showed declines in viral fragments. A sampling from Brevard County, home to Cape Canaveral, also showed a decrease.
The CDC cannot distinguish between the coronavirus’ omicron variant and one of its subvariants, BA.2, CDC spokeswoman Jasmine Reed said Friday by email. “We are currently looking into these efforts and will update the surveillance system as appropriate,” she said.
Boston company that tests sewage nationally reports mixed results
Boston-based laboratory Biobot, which collects and tests sewage from across the nation, reports mixed results.
BA.2 particles constituted one-third of coronavirus fragments in Seminole County sewage Biobot examined Wednesday. But it found no trace of the subvariant in a sample from Hillsborough County, home to Tampa.
BA.2 is known as “stealth omicron” because of how tough it is for regular COVID-19 polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tests to detect and distinguish from the delta variant.
Sewage test results can detect the spread of the coronavirus in a community faster than swab testing in part because it takes a shorter time to process the results. None of the six Florida counties Biobot gets samples from show a recent spike in viral fragment levels.
Florida health officials have cut COVID-19 reporting to every week, from weekly. Their previous data release was March 11. The next will come March 25.
To figure out how widespread and dangerous COVID-19 currently is in Florida, statistics seekers must piece together data from federal websites and other sources. Those numbers, collected from the state Health Department, can be as old as several days or a week by the time they’re published.
Eighth week in a row that Florida death count has hovered above 500 per week
Florida’s death toll sits at 72,592 residents, data collected Thursday by the CDC shows. That’s a 732-person increase from what state health officials reported March 11.
It is the eighth week in a row the weekly statewide fatality count has hovered above 500. During the delta variant-driven coronavirus surge last summer, weekly deaths stayed above that number for 14 weeks straight.
The respiratory disease is hitting a swath of the Panhandle around Tallahassee harder than the rest of Florida.
Madison County, on the state’s northern border with Georgia, recorded Florida’s highest death rate in the 30 days ending Thursday — about one in 1,000 residents. A total of 21 fatalities were logged there, which is a high sum for the rural county of about 19,000 people.
Just 46% of eligible Madison County residents ages 5 and older have received at least two shots of the Moderna or Pfizer vaccines, or one shot of the single-dose Johnson & Johnson formula, federal data shows.
Florida saw smallest 1-week increase in cases since Thanksgiving week
Florida’s total case count increased by 8,005 from March 11 through Thursday, the smallest one-week hike since Thanksgiving week, a comparison of CDC and state data shows. The state has logged 5,832,733 infections over the course of the pandemic, the CDC reported Thursday.
An average of just under 2.4% of tests statewide had come back positive in the week ended Monday, according to the latest results the CDC collected from Florida. That’s the lowest level recorded by the federal agency.
Meanwhile, Florida is still tending to more COVID-positive patients than before the omicron mutation engulfed the state. Hospitals statewide are taking care of 1,135 COVID-positive patients, the U.S. Health and Human Services Department reported Friday. That number was 994 on Dec. 1.
Hospitals nationwide have about one-third as many patients as they did Dec. 1. Other large states, such as California, New York and Texas, report fewer patients compared to pre-omicron. The same is true for states such as Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Maine, where around one in five residents are ages 65 or older.
Florida health officials have offered no explanation for why state hospitalizations have been worse than other states. Nor have they offered plans on how to tackle the issue.
While COVID-positive hospitalizations nearly tripled nationwide during the omicron wave, Florida hospitalizations surged more than 11-fold.
Meanwhile, vaccinations continue to crawl at a slow pace statewide.
The CDC estimates that about 5.5 million people across Florida have received booster shots, the strongest protection against the omicron variant.
But state health officials usually report lower counts. Just over 5 million had gotten boosters as of March 11.
The CDC also says just over 16.8 million people statewide have gotten at least one shot, much higher than the 15.4 million state health officials reported March 11.
The CDC counts some people state health officials might not, such as military personnel stationed in Florida.
Chris Persaud is The Palm Beach Post’s data reporter. Email him at cpersaud@pbpost.com.
