MIAMI — Florida reported 46,923 COVID-19 cases and no new deaths Tuesday, according to Wednesday’s report to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, based on Miami Herald calculations of CDC data.
This is the largest single-day case increase of newly reported cases since the pandemic began.
Florida’s seven-day case average has seen consecutive increases since Dec. 10. On that day, the seven-day average was 1,700. It grew to 30,356 on Tuesday, the highest ever, according to Herald calculations.
In the past seven days, the state has added 18 deaths on average.
The Florida Department of Health will most likely add deaths to Tuesday’s total. The state has done this in the past when it has added cases and deaths to previous days during the pandemic.
In all, Florida has recorded at least 4,012,152 confirmed COVID-19 cases and 62,390 deaths.
COVID-19 hospitalizations in Florida
There were 3,836 people hospitalized for COVID-19 in Florida, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Wednesday report. This data is reported from 231 Florida hospitals. That’s 688 more than Tuesday’s report from 234 Florida hospitals.
COVID-19 patients take up 7.22% of all inpatient beds in the latest report’s hospitals, compared to 6.06% in Tuesday’s reporting hospitals.
This is nowhere near the high hospitalization rates from July to September when the delta variant was raging. At the hospitalization height in August, more than 15,000 patients were being reported daily by HHS, and COVID-19 patients were accounting for over 25% of hospital patients.
Of the people hospitalized in Florida, 399 were in intensive care unit beds, an increase of 65 from Tuesday’s report. That represents about 7.45% of the state’s ICU hospital beds, compared with 6.70% the previous day.
Hospitalizations generally increase about two weeks after a spike in infections. Evidence suggests that the omicron variant causes less severe illness, but public health experts emphasize that if more people get sick with even a mild case of COVID-19, then the number of those hospitalized is likely to grow too.
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