MIAMI — Florida's Department of Health on Monday confirmed 4,663 additional cases of COVID-19, bringing the state's known total to 889,864. Also, 41 resident deaths were announced, bringing the resident death toll to 17,559.
There were no nonresident deaths announced, leaving the nonresident toll at 216.
Since October, Florida has seen an increase in newly confirmed cases and on Sunday, the state reported 10,105 additional cases, the most recorded in almost four months.
While Monday's single-day case count was lower, it's still in line with what Florida has seen this month, with the health department adding more than 4,000 cases a day in its daily updates. In fact, the seven-day average of new cases in the state has jumped to 5,900, according to Monday's New York Times database tracking all the cases in the United States and the world.
There was only one day last week when the number of cases dipped below 4,000 and that was when some state-supported COVID-19 testing sites in South Florida were reopening or remained closed because of flooding and other Tropical Storm Eta-related issues.
The health department's COVID-19 report Monday also showed a big decrease in testing compared to the previous day though it's not the lowest recorded this month.
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.
Epidemiologists use the testing data to create a positivity rate. The rate helps them determine if a rise in cases is because of an increase in testing or whether there's increased transmission of the virus in the community.
On Monday, Florida's Department of Health reported the results of 62,733 people tested on Sunday. The positivity rate of new cases (people who tested positive for the first time) increased from 7.57% to 7.95%.
If retests are included — people who have tested positive once and are being tested for a second time — the positivity rate increased from 9.20% to 9.54%, according to the report.
One of the tools that officials rely on to determine whether the coronavirus situation is improving in the state is hospitalization data. Unlike testing, which might be limited or take days to report results, hospitalizations can help give officials a real-time snapshot of how many people are severely ill with COVID-19.
The Florida Agency for Health Care Administration reports the number of patients hospitalized statewide with a "primary diagnosis of COVID." The data, which is updated at least every hour, does not distinguish between the number of COVID-19 patients in hospital intensive care units and those in acute-care beds, which require less attention from nurses.
Previously, the state was providing only the total number of hospitalizations in its statewide and county-level data. Miami-Dade was an exception, with hospitals self-reporting a number of key metrics, including hospitalizations, to the county, which has made this data public for several months.
As of 3 p.m. EST Monday, there were 3,243 COVID-19 patients admitted into hospitals throughout the state, according to the Florida Agency for Health Care Administration dashboard. While this is an uptick compared to the hospitalization numbers from October, it is still a decrease from early August, when more than 5,000 COVID-19 patients were admitted into hospitals throughout the state.
Of Monday's hospitalizations, 465 were in Miami-Dade, 284 in Broward, 235 in Palm Beach and 10 in Monroe counties, according to the agency.
The state has had a total of 52,019 Florida residents hospitalized for COVID-19-related complications, according to Florida's COVID-19 Data and Surveillance Dashboard.
