Does your city have COVID-19 cases? Florida shares some local data for the first time
UPDATE: On Sunday night, after this story first published, the Florida Department of Health shared a complete list of the cities of residence for all 937 Florida residents who are confirmed positive for COVID-19.
Initially, on Saturday, state health officials had limited the municipal-level data to cases with no known links to travel and no known contact with another confirmed case. Now, for the first time, the public can see definitively whether residents in their cities have tested positive.
The city of Miami has 125 confirmed cases among its residents, far more than any other municipality in Florida as of Sunday. Hollywood is second with 44, followed by Fort Lauderdale with 39.
The complete list as of Sunday can be found on pages four through eight of this document. Data shared after Sunday can be found via the Florida Department of Health website.
Original story:
On Saturday, Florida health officials gave the public a glimpse for the first time of where residents who have tested positive for COVID-19 live — not just at the county level, but at the municipal level, too.
In the first of its twice-daily reports Saturday morning, the Florida Department of Health included a chart that broke down the municipalities of residence for 265 cases statewide. The breakdown was limited to cases with no known links to travel and no known contact with another confirmed case.
It was the first time state officials had released city-level data since they started issuing lengthier, more detailed versions of their daily case reports on March 16.
That breakdown had been removed from a later version of the report Saturday evening, and was also not included in the department’s Sunday morning update. A spokesperson for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis did not immediately respond to an inquiry Sunday about why the data had briefly appeared and whether it would be included in future reports.
The data released Saturday showed that 37 city of Miami residents had tested positive with no recent travel history and no known contact with another person who was confirmed positive. That was the highest concentration of such cases for any municipality in the state.
The next highest: Tampa, with 17 cases, followed by Hollywood, in Broward County, with 16. Fort Lauderdale was sixth with 11 cases and Miami Beach was seventh with 10.
Other municipalities in Miami-Dade County included in Saturday’s chart were Hialeah (five cases), North Miami Beach (four cases), Miami Gardens and Key Biscayne (two cases each), and Homestead (one case).
The data reflects where the patients reside, not necessarily where they contracted the novel coronavirus.
State officials announced Sunday morning that there were 67 new confirmed COVID-19 cases in Florida, bringing the total to 830.
South Florida has emerged as a hotspot for confirmed COVID-19 infections. Broward County had 180 and Miami-Dade had 177 as of Sunday morning, accounting for 43% of the state’s total.
This story was originally published March 22, 2020 at 1:44 PM.