Florida COVID cases rising faster

Florida’s surge of COVID-19 cases escalated significantly Friday when the Florida Department of Health announced 73,166 new resident cases of COVID-19 since last Friday, nearly double the already high rates from last week’s report and more than seven times of where they were in mid-June.

On Thursday, the U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy noted that in Florida “cases are rising at an alarming rate, hospitalizations are going up, and deaths are going up,” Murthy said in an interview with McClatchy.

Last July was the worst month of the Florida pandemic, with daily case counts routinely topping 10,000. As of Thursday, Florida recorded 13,256 new daily COVID cases, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported, the highest single day count since January.

Murthy, in the McClatchy interview on Thursday, said pockets of the state with low vaccination rates were contributing to rising cases, hospitalizations and deaths.

“The challenge we have in Florida, and in far too many states, is we still don’t have vaccination rates high enough, and in some pockets, we have actually vaccination rates that are quite low,” he said. “And the consequence of that is that COVID is now spreading very quickly in those populations. So that’s what concerns me.”

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https://www.miamiherald.com/news/coronavirus/article252981888.html