Patients with COVID-19 have been slowly filling hospital beds across Florida since Thanksgiving.
Medical staff tended to 1,330 COVID-positive patients statewide on Friday, the U.S. Health and Human Services Department reported. That figure had hovered around 1,100 during the weeks leading up to Thanksgiving on Nov. 24 but has increased each day since.
Statewide hospitalizations have yet to break 4,200, as Florida experienced this past summer, or more than 10,000 as during last winter’s surge caused by the coronavirus’ omicron mutation.
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What is not known is how many current COVID patients tested positive for the respiratory illness while in the hospital and how many came to medical facilities because they caught the disease.
Gov. Ron DeSantis said in January that his administration would report the distinction to more clearly illustrate the severity of the omicron surge at the time. That has yet to happen.
Florida’s COVID caseload has been rising for weeks, following a months-long decline, state Health Department data shows.
State health officials logged an average of 15,466 new infections each week in the 14 days leading up to Friday, figures from the Health Department show.
During October, the weekly average plunged to about 10,000.
About 11% of tests over the past week have come back positive, the state reported Friday, up from 7.1% during the week ending Oct. 7.
Case counts and hospitalization rates have not yet become high enough in any of Florida’s 67 counties for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to recommend indoor masking for their residents to prevent COVID from straining hospitals.
Florida’s COVID death toll increased by an average of 163 people per week during the two weeks ending Friday. Fatalities can take weeks to enter official statistics.
About 23% of Florida residents ages 65 and older have gotten the latest COVID booster shot that was federally approved in August, built to fight omicron subvariants. That’s the fifth-lowest elderly inoculation rate in the United States, according to data the CDC published Friday.
Nationwide, 33% of seniors are up to date on their shots. COVID causes more severe sickness in older people.
About 8% of all eligible Florida residents and 13% of Americans are up to date on their shots, the CDC says.
Those latest shots from Moderna and Pfizer were designed to fight infections caused by the omicron BA.4 and BA.5 subvariants. Other omicron subvariants, such as BQ and BF.7 have since become the dominant strains nationwide. But they look more similar to the BA mutations than the original viral version from Wuhan, China, that the first vaccines from 2020 were built for.
COVID has infected more than 7.2 million Floridians, or 33.5% of the population. It has killed at least 83,210 people statewide.
Florida’s COVID death toll excludes more than 3,000 victims 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.
Chris Persaud is The Palm Beach Post’s data reporter. Email him at cpersaud@pbpost.com. Click @ChrisMPersaud and follow him on Twitter.
