Florida is responsible for 20 percent of all new COVID infections in the country, according to a White House official.
COVID cases are rising in each state as the more transmissible Delta variant spreads more easily in regions across the country with low vaccination rates.
At Friday’s White House coronavirus press briefing, COVID-19 response coordinator Jeff Zients said the country will “continue to experience an increase in COVID cases in the weeks ahead, with these cases concentrated in communities with lower vaccination rates.”
“Just four states accounted for more than 40 percent of all cases in the past week, with one in five of all cases occurring in Florida alone. And within communities, these cases are occurring primarily among unvaccinated individuals,” Zients said.
Only 47 percent of Floridians eligible for the vaccine are fully vaccinated. 55 percent have received at least one dose.
Currently, the state is reporting an average of 29 new infections for every 100,000 people per day — more than four times the national average, according to the Hill. The positivity rate is 10 percent, and the seven-day moving average is more than 5,600 cases a day.
This as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) began selling “Don’t Fauci My Florida” merch, the latest in a string of attacks against the nation’s top infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci.
Asked about the growing number of cases earlier this week, DeSantis said the state will not take any action that restricts a person’s ability to decide for themselves what they want to do, according to BayNews9.
“No mandates for anything, these are individual choices,” he said. He also explained that the rise in cases was not unexpected.
“I made comments at the end of April or beginning of May, I said ‘look, this is a seasonal pattern.’ We knew it was going to be low in May and it was low, and we knew when we got to the end of June, July, it was going to go up, and it was because that’s what it did last year and it’s not unique just to Florida,” DeSantis said.
