Fla. Governor Just Earned a Dubious New COVID Honor

While New York state reconciles its numbers on COVID deaths, Florida has a sobering new set of its own. Nearly a year and a half after the disease shut the world down, the Sunshine State is experiencing more coronavirus infections, hospitalizations, and deaths than at any other point during the pandemic, reports the New York Times. Over the weekend, the average number of cases per day surpassed 23,000, almost a third higher than Florida's previous high point in January, according to the Times' stats. And as of Wednesday, the average number of deaths reported daily was 228. Using the same database, that number peaked at 185 last summer, exceeding 200 just a few days ago, per Yahoo News.

• A dubious honor for Ron DeSantis: Yahoo notes this makes Florida's leader "the first (and so far only) governor in the US whose state is now recording more COVID-19 deaths each day than during any previous wave of the virus," even after vaccines have been available to adults and kids over 12 for months.
• Strain on health care: Hospitalizations in Florida due to the virus have jumped nearly threefold over the past month, with more than 17,200 infected people in the state now at medical centers, per federal data. "We are exhausted," an internal medicine specialist in Palm Beach County tells the Times. "Our patience and resources are running low."
• 'Unimaginable': CNN features an especially heartbreaking story—that of a cancer patient who needed emergency treatment but had to be turned away from a Tampa-area hospital because it was filled with COVID patients. "We just didn't have a bed," Nitesh Paryani, a radiation oncologist at Tampa Oncology and Proton, tells the outlet. "There was simply no room in the hospital to treat the patient." He recently wrote more about his experience in an op-ed for the Washington Post.

• Slamming the younger set: A rising number of those in hospitals and dying are tracking younger than in previous waves. Individuals ages 40 to 59 have been particularly hard hit. Doctors stress, however, that more than 90% of those who've succumbed to the illness weren't vaccinated. "We've had more patients this time around that have passed away at a younger age with very few if any medical problems," Dr. Chirag Patel, the assistant chief medical officer for UF Health Jacksonville, tells the Times. "They simply come in with COVID, and they don't make it out of the hospital."
• Vaccination rate: Some 52% of Floridians overall have been fully vaxxed, but in some pockets that number dips to less than 30%.
• 'So what went wrong?' The delta variant, apparently, combined with an easing of health and safety protocols, per Yahoo, which answered its own question by comparing Florida to California; the former has been much more lax on such things as masking, distancing, and closures than the latter. "What's different in Florida is that, relative to the vaccination rate (~50%), the relaxation of distancing and masking was disproportionately high," says a Mayo Clinic professor of medicine. "Leaders expressed disdain for masks and mask mandates. The total number of people unvaccinated is high. And hospitals got overwhelmed."

(More Florida stories.)