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Florida COVID-19 Reality Check – September 28th, 2021
Bottom Line: It’s officially fall and thankfully Florida left the summer surge of COVID-19 cases in summer. We’ve continued to experience a rapid decline of new COVID-19 cases, 65% below peak levels and subsequent hospitalizations. The peak of the surge occurred August 17th, six weeks ago, and Florida’s trendline has steadily improved ever since. Vaccination rates have continued to rise, with over 70% of Florida’s eligible population having been vaccinated and without catalysts of concern on the horizon the news is set to continue to improve significantly 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 11% from where we are today reaching a level of about 6,800 daily new cases in two weeks. The average projection has Florida seeing a 35% decrease in cases to around 4,900 daily cases over the next two weeks. The best-case scenario is much better news. Under that scenario, cases are expected to decline by 57% over the next two weeks leaving us with around 3,300 daily cases. Those are all significant improvements over a week ago.
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.