Florida Breaks Daily COVID Record Again with 25,000 New Cases

The CDC listed Florida with 24,869 cases for the day, the state's highest number since the start of the pandemic.

Florida's weekly coronavirus metrics report is expected to be released Friday showing an eighth consecutive week with an upward trend in new cases.

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The CDC reports a 7-day average of 21,210 new cases in Florida, with more than 20,000 cases in six of the last eight days.

Aug. 11: 24,869
Aug. 10: 20,465
Aug. 9: 15,324
Aug. 8: 19,564
Aug. 7: 21,488
Aug. 6: 23,983
Aug. 5: 22,778
Aug. 4: 20,214

In Florida, Brevard County officials issued an urgent plea this week for residents to try to avoid using ambulance services with non-emergency calls or going to hospitals for COVID-19 testing.

"Hospital emergency rooms are inundated with patients with COVID-19 symptoms," according to Brevard County Emergency Manager John Scott. The county's three hospital systems are over capacity and continue to deal with a surge of patients, creating safety concerns for other emergencies, such as trauma patients related to car accidents or heart attack victims.

According to Telemundo, patients are being treated in the hallways because of congestion in hospital services.

Overall, the number of new daily cases has continued to rise in Florida and the state has become the new epicenter of COVID-19 in the United States.According to CDC data, the state's seven-day rolling average of cases has continued to rise since mid-July to numbers the state had not seen during the pandemic.

Four teachers died from COVID-19 between Monday and Wednesday of this week in Broward County (Florida), one of the hot spots of the current wave of coronavirus infections and whose authorities have made mandatory the use of facemasks in public education, despite a ban by the governor.

Ana Fusco, head of the Broward Teachers Union, confirmed to CNN news channel and local media these deaths occurred a week before the start of the school year in this southeast Florida county, scheduled for next week.

The three teachers and the teacher's assistant who died were apparently not vaccinated, according to Rosalind Osgood, president of the Broward School Board, told CNN.

The "pandemic of the unvaccinated," as President Joe Biden has defined it, is severely affecting Florida, where the contagious Delta variant is spreading rapidly and producing record daily infections and deaths, as well as hospitalizations.

Only half of Florida's population is fully immunized against the virus.

Governor Ron Desantis, a Republican and opposed to the anti-COVID-19 strategy of the governmental Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), has banned by law the mandatory use of masks in schools and the requirement of vaccination certificates in businesses and institutions.

In the case of schools, its policy has been to delegate to parents the power to decide whether or not their children wear masks and has threatened financial penalties to those who violate these rules.

The Broward school board defied that order and children and teachers will be required to wear masks when classes resume.