Florida News that impacts you – June 19th
Bottom Line: Your daily recap of the some of the biggest news from around the state that impacts you in South Florida.
- Florida, for the sixth time over the past eight days, has experienced a new daily high for diagnosed COVID-19 cases. 3,207 new cases were diagnosed Thursday. Over the past week Florida has exceed 2,000 and now 3,000 daily cases for the first time. Immokolee, in Collier county has the highest concentration of any zip code, however 51% of all Florida cases have come from Broward, Miami-Dade and Palm Beach Counties.
- With the surge in COVID-19 cases over the past week plus, Florida’s hospitalizations have been steadily rising as well. According to the Agency for Health Care Administration, Florida’s ICU bed availability has dropped below 25% availability for the first time since the pandemic began. Currently 1,371 beds are available out of 6,064 available statewide. The lowest availability is in Hillsborough County at 19% availability – followed by Broward at 22.6%
- Due to the pandemic,Governor DeSantis signed an executive order enabling mailed in ballots earlier than current state law allows. Under Florida law ballots may not be tabulated earlier than 22 days prior to Election Day. They’ll now be able to tabulate as votes are received. DeSantis declined a request to allow for additional in person early voting days – which had also been requested by some election's supervisors.
- Florida had the biggest week over week improvement in new unemployment claims of any state. With just over 86,000 new claims reported, it’s the fewest since the lockdowns began in March.