How can you track the COVID trend in Florida? You have options to monitor health risk
COVID is once again surging through Florida. How bad is it?
Florida no longer provides daily public updates, but the public can find resources to track the data So, what information can help you make good health decisions?
You’ll need to know about the positivity rate and risk level in your county, the number of people in the hospital, and the latest number of cases and deaths. Keep in mind that cases may be undercounted as more people take home tests and don’t report the results.
Jason Salemi, an associate professor at the University of South Florida’s College of Public Health in Tampa, acknowledges how difficult it can be for regular people to access information for their health. That inspired him to start and maintain his own virus dashboard using state and federal data.
“People have a difficult time wading through that information, or maybe visiting multiple pages that they have to go to access the meaningful information,” he said.
Where can you find case, death and vaccine data?
In the beginning months of the pandemic in 2020, the Florida Department of Health released daily figures on the state’s case and death counts. However, the department now only reports this data to the public once every two weeks, although it sends updates to the CDC on a near-daily basis.
Here’s where you can find Florida data provided to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on a regular basis:
▪ The Miami Herald calculates and analyzes a weekly COVID report with CDC data. Updates are published Tuesdays at MiamiHerald.com. The report includes information on cases, deaths, hospitalizations and vaccinations in Miami-Dade, Broward, Monroe, Palm Beach and Manatee counties.
▪ The CDC’s COVID Data tracker shows case, death, vaccine and testing data for nearly every county in the U.S.
▪ The CDC calculates COVID-19 community levels and recommendations that can help people understand the severity of virus transmission in their respective counties. Using hospital and case data, the CDC assigns a county one of three transmission levels: low, medium or high.
▪ The CDC has recently added two omicron subvariants, BA.4 and BA.5, that are being closely tracked due to their increased ability to evade vaccination and previous infection. The agency shares information on these variants, along with all other active strains of COVID.
Do South Florida counties have their own COVID dashboards?
Miami-Dade is the only South Florida county that continues to consistently release local information on the virus. Broward, Palm Beach and Monroe have stopped, and refer people to the state health department and the CDC trackers.
Public school districts do not release case information.
The Miami-Dade COVID-19 Daily Dashboard includes the Florida health department report, county deaths tracked by the Miami-Dade Department of Health, county fire-rescue calls, virus wastewater surveillance, and testing at county sites.
The county no longer publishes a hospital report, which showed patient information along with vaccinated and unvaccinated breakdowns at local hospitals.
COVID cases in the schools
All four South Florida public school districts have seen more than 1,000 positive students in the 2021-2022 school year. Though the school year has ended in most districts, data are still available.
Miami-Dade, Broward, Palm Beach and Monroe’s school districts each offer dashboards that break down how many students and employees have tested positive at an individual school. Across all charts, the data show an increase in cases during the omicron wave, December to February, and a slight increase in the last few weeks.
Information about school district coronavirus dashboards:
▪ Miami-Dade County Public School District has seen 13,431 students and employees test positive in the 2021-22 school year.
▪ Broward County Public School District has seen 17,417 students and employees test positive in the 2021-22 school year.
▪ Palm Beach County Public School District has seen 14,489 students and employees test positive in the 2021-22 school year.
▪ Monroe County School District has seen 1,462 students and employees test positive in the 2021-22 school year.
How many COVID patients are in hospitals?
As more people test positive, hospitals are seeing an increase in COVID patients.
In this most recent increase, hospital admissions have been slowly increasing since the end of April. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services keeps dashboards on hospitalizations.
Over the past three weeks, on average, 55 more people were hospitalized and five more people entered the ICU each day in Florida, according to Miami Herald calculations of HHS data. While there are 3,078 hospitalized patients and 287 people in the ICU, the state is nowhere near the level of hospitalizations during the delta and omicron waves, with 15,000 hospital patients a day.
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How do I protect myself?
With COVID cases on the rise across Florida and the CDC recommending masks once again, what can you do to protect yourself?
Salemi, the USF professor, stressed the oft-repeated advice of masking up and social distancing. These steps are particularly important in the summer as the heat and rain drive people into crowded, poorly ventilated areas, which are an incubator for COVID infections.
At the same time, he warns against total lockdowns. As long as people take measured precautions, he said lockdowns may do more harm than good.
U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy said earlier this year that loneliness is associated with an increased risk of physical and mental health illnesses.
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Why you need COVID information
New subvariants of omicron are quickly spreading across Florida. The BA.4 and BA.5 now make up 13% of new COVID cases in the state, up from just 1% at the beginning of May, according to a CDC report.
These subvariants bring new challenges.
“The current circulating strains of the Omicron SARS-CoV-2 variant are very infectious,” said Aileen Marty, professor of infectious diseases in the Department of Medicine at Florida International University’s Herbert Wertheim College of Medicine.
Although vaccines and recent COVID infections help protect against these new subvariants, they do not make people immune to them. These factors are expected to contribute to an increase in cases and hospitalizations, Salemi said.
Mary Jo Trepka, an infectious disease epidemiologist and professor at Florida International University, agrees.
“If you’ve been previously infected or previously vaccinated, any immunity that you have will probably be not quite as protective against these new variants compared to the earlier omicron variants.”
This story was originally published June 13, 2022 at 6:00 AM.
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