According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Florida set a record for the number of COVID cases in a single day on Saturday.
The state recorded 21,683 new cases of COVID-19, the highest one-day total since the start of the pandemic, beating the previous record set on Jan. 7 of 19,816.
With numbers like these, Florida is well and truly in its third peak as cases have been steadily increasing. The state recorded 17,093 new cases on Thursday, and 17,589 on Friday. The average over the last seven days is 15,817 cases, according to the CDC.
Cases have risen sharply in the past month in Florida, fueled by the highly transmissible delta variant. On Friday, the state reported over 110,000 new COVID-19 in the past week — the highest weekly increase since the start of the year.
Gov. Ron DeSantis has downplayed the rise in cases, blaming it on the weather.
“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 earlier this month.
Florida accounts for about 21.4% of the country’s new COVID infections, despite making up just 6.5% of the U.S. population.
Still DeSantis does not plan on taking any actions to fight the pandemic in his state. He has been an outspoken critic of the CDC mask recommendations and as recent as Friday signed a new executive order blocking schools from mandating masks.
