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Florida COVID-19 Reality Check – November 16th, 2021
Bottom Line: The news continues to improve in Florida as we head towards the holidays. We entered this week averaging only 1,497 new daily cases of COVID-19 over the past week. That’s notable because it’s the fewest, not just this year, but since the second week of June last year. Not only is Florida now at year and a half year lows in total COVID-19 cases, we’ve also completed four consecutive weeks with the fewest population adjusted COVID cases in the country. Given that the virus hasn’t gone away, the news is about as good as we could hope for at this point. The question is...will the better news continue through Thanksgiving?
The Mayo Clinic’s tracker and projection tool has been highly accurate throughout the pandemic. Looking at the 14-day projections, the news is generally encouraging. 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.Here’s what’s anticipated over the next couple of weeks.
Under the worst-case projection from the Mayo Clinic, Florida’s cases would increase by 57% from where we are today, leaving the state pacing around 2,352 new cases daily in two weeks. The average projection has Florida seeing a 14% decrease in cases to around 1,300 daily cases. The best-case scenario continues to provide much better news. Under that scenario we’d see a decline in cases to around the earliest weeks of the pandemic with a decline of 57% over the next two weeks leaving us with around 650 daily cases.
What’s interesting is that the Mayo Clinic’s projections only show one of their three models resulting in a spike in cases associated with Thanksgiving get togethers. That means there’s a two-thirds chance it doesn’t happen and we continue to see progress heading into December. That’s encouraging...fingers crossed.
Many experts expect a winter surge in cases, so perhaps we’re not out of the woods with the pandemic yet, however the odds generally remain in our favor for continued improvement for at least the next couple of weeks. And it remains best to be in Florida for any number of reasons, including currently having the fewest relative COVID-19 cases in the country.