Pandemic ‘End In Sight’: Here’s How COVID-19 Stands In Florida

FLORIDA — The “end is in sight” for the pandemic, the World Health Organization said this week, but there are still precautions Florida residents should take to live with COVID-19, according to health officials.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data shows new U.S. cases and hospitalizations are trending downward to the lowest level since the pandemic began. Still, the number of deaths — an average of 357 a day, according to the CDC’s seven-day rolling average, are far above the average of 168 daily deaths for the week ending July 6, 2022. Just three months ago, the average was 258 daily deaths, according to the chart.

According to the Florida COVID dashboard — which is only updated once every two weeks and last had data entered Sept. 9 — the state had a seven-day rolling average of 12.4 percent positive cases. In total for the week shown, Florida had 28,791 new cases of the disease; the state has recorded a total of 7,066,234 cases throughout the pandemic.

For the same period, Florida had 33 COVID deaths, with a total of 80,386 deaths over the entire pandemic.

According to the New York Times, the state has confirmed a total of 7.09 million COVID cases, and 80,782 deaths. On Thursday, Florida saw 3,368 new cases of the disease, and 69 deaths. That was a 41 percent decline in cases from two weeks earlier, and a 33 percent drop in deaths.

In Florida, the rate of daily hospitalizations due to COVID is the second-highest in the nation, behind Texas.

“We have never been in a better position to end the pandemic,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in a briefing Wednesday after COVID-19 deaths reached their lowest level — 11,000 for the week of Sept. 5-11 — since the pandemic began.

“We are not there yet, but the end is in sight,” he said, warning that “now is the worst time to stop running” in the race against the virus.

The United States is seeing “an important shift in our fight against the virus,” White House COVID-19 Response Coordinator Dr. Ashish Jha said at a briefing earlier this month.

That’s if the virus doesn’t mutate again, making a new omicron-specific booster shot less effective.

“In the absence of dramatically different variants, we likely are moving towards a path with a vaccination cadence similar to that of the annual influenza vaccine, with annual updated COVID-19 shots matched to the currently circulating strains for most of the population,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy of Infectious Diseases, said at the briefing.

Health officials recommend the new booster shot for all Americans, but especially for people 50 and older and people with underlying health issues.

Just over 79 percent of the U.S. population has received at least one dose of COVID-19 vaccine, but the number of people who are fully vaccinated with one booster shot drops off significantly, standing at 48 percent.

The Times reports 68 percent of all Floridians are fully vaccinated for COVID, with 29 percent also receiving a booster. Among residents age 65 and older, 93 percent are fully vaccinated and 60 percent have gotten a booster shot.

According to state data, 2,205,983 Florida residents have had the first dose of a vaccine; 7,819,623have completed a vaccination series; and 5,991,526 people have received a booster shot.

Hospitalizations are an important metric used by health officials to track the impact of COVID-19 in specific areas. The most current CDC hospitalization forecast says admissions will “remain stable or have an uncertain trend,” with between 1,300 to 7,700 new confirmed admissions likely by the first week in October.

In Florida, the rate of daily hospitalizations due to COVID is the second-highest in the nation, behind Texas.

Predictions are there will be just under 400 new hospital admissions by the first week of October.