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After two consecutive days below 20,000 new COVID-19 cases, Florida’s weekly trend for cases declined for the first time since the summer surge since the Delta variant began. Florida posted 16,476 new cases on Sunday and 17,216 on Monday. Furthermore, hospitalizations appear to be levelling off as well. After dropping below 16,000 COVID-19 hospitalizations on Sunday, Florida’s hospitals maintained the level on Monday.
In other news, twenty of Florida’s 67 school districts are short of the necessary bus drivers at the start of the school year. This includes Broward’s school district which is short approximately 150 drivers and begins its school year tomorrow, in addition to unknown numbers in Miami-Dade, which begins next week and Palm Beach County which hasn’t disclosed another issue but has been recommending parents drive their children to school if possible since school began last week.
Following multiple studies indicating mRNA vaccines are the most effective against COVID-19 variants, the federal government will no longer be sending Johnson & Johnson vaccines to Florida. They’d commonly been used for mass vaccination sites because of the one-shot approach.
Lastly, according to Visit Florida, tourism to our state was only 2.2% below 2019’s record levels in the second quarter. That was driven by a record amount of domestic tourism as more Americans visited Florida in the spring than in any prior year.