June 19, 2020 | 1:23pm | Updated June 19, 2020 | 2:13pm
Florida broke another single-day record for coronavirus cases Friday morning when the Sunshine State’s health department confirmed 3,822 new infections — the third time it hit a new high this week, reports said.
Previously, the highest single-day count was 3,207 and was recorded just 24 hours earlier on Thursday, the Miami Herald reported.
The previous record was confirmed two days earlier on Tuesday with 2,783 new cases, the Sun-Sentinel reported.
The state now has a total of 89,748 cases and 3,104 deaths, including 43 new fatalities announced Friday, according to the Miami Herald.
An analysis of public and non-public COVID-19 data prepared by the newspaper discovered that as of June 3, new cases in Florida have been spiking since mid-May when the state began to reopen and the trends weren’t just a result of testing increases, the outlet reported.
As models show Florida shaping up to become the next coronavirus epicenter, Gov. Ron DeSantis deflected blame and attributed the bump in cases to migrant farmworkers who work and live in close conditions.
“Some of these guys go to work in a school bus, and they are all just packed there like sardines, going across Palm Beach County or some of these other places, and there’s all these opportunities to have transmission,” DeSantis said Tuesday, adding there are no plans for another shutdown as bars, gyms, vacation rentals and movie theaters continue to reopen.
“We’re not rolling back,” DeSantis told reporters.
“The reason we did the mitigation was to protect the hospital system.“
Two days before those comments, the Sun-Sentinel had reported troubling indicators from the state’s hospitals, finding that many were close to capacity.
In Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach counties — the most heavily affected regions — about 70% of ICU beds and general hospital beds were in use on Sunday, the outlet reported.
Similar numbers were seen across the state in other heavily populated counties, the outlet wrote.
