New COVID-19 Cases In FL Increase 42 Percent In 1 Week: Report

FLORIDA — With 15,684 COVID-19 cases reported in the last seven days, Florida is seeing a surge in new coronavirus cases, according to a USA Today analysis of data reported by Johns Hopkins University on Tuesday.

That represents a 42 percent increase in new cases over the previous week, reports said.

This also brings Florida’s total number of COVID-19 cases to 2.38 million since the start of the pandemic, according to Johns Hopkins. The state has also seen nearly 38,000 deaths from the virus since March 2020.

The new case positivity rate was 5.2 percent between June 25 and July 1, according to the Florida Department of Health’s COVID-19 Weekly Situation Report. The state switched to weekly rather than daily COVID-19 reports in early June.

During this period, the health department said 15,978 new cases were reported. In the week prior to this, which ended June 18, 11,807 new cases were reported in Florida, and there was a 3.8 percent positivity rate, the state said.

The highly infectious delta variant is driving up new COVID-19 cases across the country. This includes Florida, where the delta variant accounts for 13.2 of new cases, the Tampa Bay Times reported. It currently makes up 51 percent of all new cases in the United States.

The delta variant was first identified in India in December, where it quickly became the dominant strain, and has since spread across the globe. The variant has been detected in more than 100 countries, Al Jazeera reported.

Jay Wolfson, a public health professor at the University of South Florida, said unvaccinated people are causing the spread of delta and other variants.

“That unvaccinated population can help to create a new strain of the virus, which, in the worst case, would be immune to the vaccines that we are using now, which appear to be working against the effects of the viruses,” Wolfson told WKMG.

According to Florida’s weekly COVID-19 report, just over 11 million residents have received at least one shot. That represents 58 percent of those 12 and older in the state who are eligible to get vaccinated against the virus.