October 16 update: 117 new positive tests, no deaths

BY JENNIFER CABRERA

According to the state dashboard, Alachua County reported an increase of 117 positive COVID-19 tests, with an official test positivity rate of 5.48%. No new deaths were reported.

Of the people whose positive tests came back yesterday, 11were 65 or older, and 71 (65%) were college-aged.

A total of 70 deaths have been reported in the county, 30 of which were in long-term care. Paul Myers told the county commission last Tuesday that they’ve determined two of our deaths were non-Florida residents, so they will be removed from the total, but that hasn’t happened yet. Myers told the county commission this week that none of the recently-reported deaths actually occurred in the past 2 weeks.

The overall number of people (from all counties) hospitalized here for COVID-19 increased from 58 to 60.

State COVID-19 hospitalizations decreased to 2,083 today.

The state reported 3,449 new positive tests and a net increase of 94 deaths, 30 of which were from long-term care facilities.

Changes in the number of deaths were reported on 56 different dates, going back to May 18. Changes by month: May (+2), July (+4-2); August (+30); September (+25-1); October (+36). 19 were from Miami-Dade County.

The peaks are on July 30 (234) and August 4 (236), and the 7-day moving average peak is August 5 (224).

The 7-day average plateau between July 25 and August 7 has been stable since I started reporting the peaks on August 27.

Here is the full chart for context:

The state also publishes a chart of the percentage of new tests that are positive by day (this chart is for the whole state), and the official positive rate yesterday was 4.38%.

In Alachua County, the official positivity rate was 5.48%.

This chart shows the number of negative tests reported in Alachua County by day:

The 7-day moving average of new cases is at 69 through yesterday’s cases. Here is the 7-day average of new cases for the past 14 days: