MIAMI _ Florida's Department of Health on Thursday morning confirmed 808 additional cases of COVID-19, pushing the state's total of confirmed cases past 43,000. The state now has a total of 43,210 known cases.
There were also 48 new deaths announced for the second day in a row, raising the statewide death toll to 1,875.
Thursday's daily total of newly confirmed cases has more than doubled from Wednesday's count but is still less than Tuesday's, when 941 additional cases of COVID-19 were reported, the highest the state had seen since May 1, when cases surpassed 1,000. Tuesday was also the day the state recorded its highest number of new tests conducted in a single day since the pandemic began.
More than half of the state's known COVID-19 cases are in South Florida's four counties: Miami-Dade, Broward, Palm Beach and Monroe. Miami-Dade continues to lead the state with the most confirmed cases and deaths. It has 14,742 known cases and 535 deaths.
Despite the daily reports of new cases and deaths, local and state officials have previously said that decreases in the daily total of reported cases are signs that social distancing measures are working.
Officials are also relying on hospitalization data. Unlike testing, which might be limited or take days to report results, hospitalizations can help give officials a real-time visual of how many people are severely ill with COVID-19.
The health department says it doesn't "have a figure" to reflect the number of people currently hospitalized and only provides the total number of hospitalizations in its statewide and county-level data. But hospitals in Miami-Dade are self-reporting a number of key metrics, including hospitalizations, to the county. Some provide updates every day and others don't.
And because scientists are still working to learn more about the virus, including how many people in the community are actually infected with the disease and have mild or no symptoms, it's difficult to determine what percentage of the cases hospitalizations represent.
Testing in Florida has seen a steady growth since the COVID-19 crisis began and has begun to see a steady decline in the percentage of people testing positive.
Testing, like hospitalizations, helps officials determine the virus's progress and plays a role in deciding whether it is safe to lift stay-at-home orders and loosen restrictions.
The recommended numbers of daily tests needed varies by experts, but the dean of the University of South Florida's College of Medicine told the governor Florida needs to test about 33,000 people every day.
Florida reached the recommended mark for the first time on May 2 and has since seen its daily testing numbers either surpass or be below the mark by several thousand.
On Wednesday, the daily total of new tests surpassed the mark with 33,737 new tests reported but was several thousands below Tuesday's record of 40,686, the highest reported in a single day since the pandemic began. In total, 595,478 tests have been conducted. Of those, 42,402 were positive, or 7.12%. The state says there are 1,191 pending tests.
But health experts told the Miami Herald last month they were concerned the number of pending COVID-19 tests listed by the state is an undercount because Florida reports only the number of Floridians waiting to get test results from state labs, not private ones _ and private labs are completing more than 90% of state tests.
Previously, it has taken as long as two weeks for the results of pending tests from private labs to be added into the state's official count, making it difficult for officials to project the size and scale of the pandemic in the state. It's unclear how quickly results are currently being sent to the state from private labs.
