Florida is about to hit a grim milestone in its battle against coronavirus as The Sunshine State grows ever-closer to hitting 1 million cases.
The state has a known total of 985,297 COVID-19 cases as of Saturday, when the Florida Department of Health confirmed 6,277 new COVID-19 cases, The Associated Press reports.
Saturday also saw the southeastern state confirm 81 new deaths related to the virus. Currently, Florida has seen a total of 18,442 deaths linked to coronavirus.
Instead of reporting case numbers on Thursday, amid Thanksgiving, when many testing sites were closed, the state reported a two-day tally of 17,344 on Friday night.
At the time of publication, Miami-Dade had the third highest number of cases for any county nationwide with 224,166 confirmed COVID-19 infections, according to a running tally by Johns Hopkins University & Medicine’s Coronavirus Resource Center.
That tally shows Miami-Dade has seen 3,799 people die from COVID-19, the seventh highest death toll in the country.
Prior to October and following the spike of cases during the summer, coronavirus hospitalizations in Florida had begun to plateau at about 2,000 a day. On Saturday morning, though, there were 3,860 coronavirus patients hospitalized.
Restrictions to curb the virus spread have not yet been implemented amid Florida’s recent spike in cases, contrary to the approach to battling the virus earlier in the year.
With News Wire Services
