Florida COVID-19 Reality Check – September 21st, 2021
Bottom Line: The better news keeps on coming in Florida. While much of the country is struggling with a recent surge in cases, Florida appears to be in a first in, first out type of cycle with the summer surge brought about by the Delta variants. Just as summer officially ends today it’s safe to say the surge is well behind us. The peak of the surge occurred August 17th, now over a month ago, and Florida’s trend line has steadily improved ever since. Florida’s current trend for new COVID-19 cases is at the lowest level in about two months and so too are hospitalizations. Labor Day had zero impact on our trend and without catalysts of concern on the horizon the news is set to continue to get significantly better over the next two weeks.
The Mayo Clinic’s tracker and projection tool has been highly accurate throughout the pandemic. Looking at the 14-day projections, the news looking out over the next couple of weeks remains the best it’s been since the Delta variants hit the scene. They provide three different models. What they call the “lower bound” projection, or best-case scenario, the middle, or average projection and an upper bound, or worst-case scenario. I’ll work backwards from the worst-case to the best. This week, even the worst-case news is good news.
Under the worst-case projection from the Mayo Clinic, Florida’s cases would decline by 21% from where we are today reaching a level of about 8,650 daily new cases in two weeks. The average projection has Florida seeing a 45% decrease in cases to around 5,975 daily cases over the next two weeks. The best-case scenario is much better news. Under that scenario, cases are expected to decline by 62% over the next two weeks leaving us with around 4,120 daily cases.
It’s clear that not only has Florida put the summer surge in COVID-19 cases behind us, but that we’re set to continue to see meaningful improvement from where we are today under even the worst-case scenario. There’s reason once again to be optimistic about Florida’s outlook in this pandemic and it appears that just as Florida led with the Delta surge in this country, we’re going to be the first to mostly put it behind us as well.