Shit's Still Bad and Getting Worse as Florida Sets Nationwide Record for New Covid Cases

While New York, once the epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic in the United States, announced its lowest covid-19 death tolls since March, other parts of the country reported staggering new numbers this weekend.

Florida recorded 15,299 new covid infections on Sunday—the record number of new single-day cases for any individual state since the pandemic began, NBC News reports. The state also saw about 18,000 hospitalizations, a deeply worrying stat that Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis tried to put a positive spin on.

“We have a situation where you’ve got a lot of beds available,” DeSantis said, per NBC. “No major system, nobody that we’ve seen yet, has even gone to the surge level.”

The Governor’s office, apparently staffed with ghouls from top to bottom, has been finding many ways to try and spin these flat-out horrifying data points into a positive narrative. His communications director, Helen Aguirre Ferré, for example, focused on the percentage of positive cases on Sunday per the total number of people tested, which happens to have declined in recent days, notes Politico. No word on when she and DeSantis are going to hell, but my sources suggest that it’s happening!

Elsewhere in the U.S.—which cleared 3.2 million total cases and 134,000 deaths this weekend, per the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention—shit is also real bad and definitely getting worse. Texas, another state where coronavirus infections have exploded in recent weeks following an early May reopening, saw more than 10,000 people hospitalized on Sunday, ABC News reports, breaking its previous single-day record for new covid-related hospitalizations.

New York, at least, had its lowest number of coronavirus deaths since March. There are some contradictory reports out there—NBC is reporting zero, while ABC pegs it at five—but whatever it is it’s a far cry from the state’s mid-April peak of the epidemic when we were seeing over 10,000 new cases in a single day.