With a another consecutive record in the number of new daily cases, Florida closed the year 2021 in an unstoppable escalation of infections when touching this Friday the nearly 76,000 people infected with coronavirus.
As state health authorities increased the number of tests performed and hospitals saw the number of patients increase, Florida continued its streak of new records of COVID-19 infections by reaching 75,962 new cases.
With this new daily record for Florida, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) raised to 4,165,962 the number of people who have been infected in that State since the start of the pandemic.
The rapid transmission of the Omicron variant and the increase in the number of tests carried out has resulted, according to reported data, a steady increase in the last week in the number of new cases.
This Monday, Florida reported 29,129 new infections. On Tuesday, the number rose to 33,567; on Wednesday at 52,995 and Thursday at 58,013. The record of this Friday surpasses in almost 18 thousand new positive cases the one of the previous day.
Also, this Friday, hospitalizations for coronavirus increased by 484, reaching a total of 4,485 people admitted for this reason, according to the Florida Hospital Association (FHA).
The figure is still well off the peak of 17,100 hospitalizations during the wave of delta infections last summer. According Telemundo 51Hospitalizations in the state have increased by more than 144% in the last week, although more than 25% of beds for adults in Intensive Care Units (ICU) are available.
Worrying is the high transmission of the virus in Miami-Dade County, whose positivity rate reached 26% of the tests carried out this Friday. The number of COVID patients in intensive care wards (ICUs) amounted to 135 in this county.
According to Mayor Daniella Levine Cava, Miami-Dade conducted a total of 68,553 tests this Friday, which also represents a new record.
This Tuesday Florida was the second state with the highest number of cases, after New York, according to the newspaper The Miami Herald, which assured that a large part of the United States is affected by the coronavirus pandemic and the emergence of the new Omicron variant.
Despite the fact that government health policies have encouraged citizen vaccination in different ways, the United States now faces a new crisis. Due to the coronavirus, more than 821 thousand people have lost their lives in less than two years in the country.
Of these deaths, 62,480 have corresponded to Florida as of this Friday. With 61.9 percent of the population with their complete immunization schedule, the United States has a percentage of infections that does not differ significantly from other developed countries, such as the United Kingdom or Germany.
“Current hospitalizations and growth rate continue to be extremely worrying. But vaccines work!” Mary C. Mayhew, president and CEO of the FHA, warned in a statement.
In fact, unlike previous waves, the elderly are not the most affected in those days. In Florida, the number of vaccinated seniors is among the highest in the country, and less than 3 percent of hospitalizations correspond to seniors or residents of nursing homes.
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