Florida passes 50,000 COVID-19 deaths

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. – Florida has lost more than 50,000 people to COVID-19, according to the latest data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention posted on Thursday.

The newest CDC metrics show Florida with 50,811 deaths connected to COVID since the start of the pandemic, an increase of 1,554 from the total reported a day earlier.

Those fatalities didn’t all happen within the past day and span back weeks.

Last month, the state health department — which sends the data to the CDC — switched from tallying deaths by the day they were verified to now tracking them by the date a person passed away. The deaths typically take several days to be processed, so a single date’s totals can slowly grow days later and the day-by-day increases appear smaller at first.

With the inclusion of the latest fatality statistics, Florida has lost more than 1,800 people with COVID in the first half of September.

August was the pandemic’s deadliest month in the state with more than 8,600 COVID deaths confirmed.

“It’s been a really tough year and a half,” said Gov. Ron DeSantis, who was in South Florida on Thursday promoting the state’s monoclonal antibody treatments for people infected with COVID-19. “Affecting families in ways that you’re not used to, so I think its been really, really rough, but I think that through some of these efforts, we’ve been able to mitigate that.”

Florida is now up to 3,473,873 verified COVID-19 cases since the start of the outbreak, an increase of 9,760 from a day prior.

New cases and COVID hospitalizations have been steadily trending downward since the peak of the summer surge in August.

For much of August, 21,000 new cases were being reported per day on average. The daily average over the past week is about 11,784, according to the CDC.

The state has also now dropped below 10,000 COVID-19 hospitalizations for the first time since late July. On Thursday, 9,917 COVID-positive patients were admitted across the state, according to the Florida Hospital Association.

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