The news just wasn’t the best on Thursday. After the recent improvement in cases and deaths, we took a step back. In Florida, the United States, and around the world, newly diagnosed cases and deaths jumped over Wednesday’s totals and broke the positive trend. We also received word that the promising Ebola fighting drug Remdisivir failed in a Chinese trial, just a week after an exceedingly positive trial at the University of Chicago Medical Center. Gilead Pharmaceuticals disputes the Chinese study based on their claims it was cut short and lacked enough participation, maybe that’s the case. Also, FDA Commissioner Dr. Stephen Hahn stated a vaccine is likely 12 months away based on current studies/progress monitored. And in other related news from Thursday, the CDC tripled the symptoms associated with COVID-19. The nine symptoms now are fever, cough, shortness of breath, chills, shaking, muscle pain, headache, sore throat, loss of taste/smell.
As of this entry, there are 2,732,701 cases, 191,150 deaths, and 750,864 recoveries around the world. In the US, there are 886,709 cases, 50,243 deaths, and 85,922 recoveries. In Florida, we have 29,648 cases and 987 deaths. Specific Florida recoveries aren’t disclosed.
We experienced over 86,000 additional diagnosed cases and over 6,800 deaths worldwide on Thursday. Those figures were both higher than the previous day’s totals as Russia continues to have the fastest-growing case count in the world. In the United States, we had over 37,000 new cases and more than 2,500 deaths, likewise totals higher than the day before. Something to be mindful of, especially in the US, is that California and Texas have been testing at rates that have been less than half of what Florida has been doing. Both states are finally ramping up testing and as they do, it's possible we’ll see an escalation in cases. Especially as California just discovered they had the US’s first two COVID-19 death’s in February.
We’ve had 1,072 new cases and 60 deaths in Florida attributed to the coronavirus over the past day. The 60 deaths match Wednesday’s total, however, the new case count jumped by more than 300 over the prior day and is the highest total within 24 hours reported since last Friday. Clearly, not the best news and specifically in the tri-county where we accounted for 2/3rds of those new cases. On the brighter side, the peak for cases in our state remains April 3rd.
More than half of all of Florida’s cases currently are in the tri-county area with Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach having the most cases in the state in that order.
- Broward: 4,431
- Miami-Dade: 10,588
- Palm Beach: 2,554
While the overall positive test rate in Florida stayed steady yesterday at 9.8%. That remains lower than the peak of 11% and that’s important. A two-week decline in the metric is one of the three guidelines outlined by President Trump for a phase 1 reopening. As a reminder, the further into testing we go, the newest diagnosed cases are new cases obtained through community spread. This reinforces the importance of adhering to the warnings of public officials including social distancing, safer-at-home declarations, and wearing masks in public.
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