ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. — The U.S. passed an alarming milestone of 5 million confirmed cases of COVID-19 Sunday and while the country leads the world in COVID cases, that might not be entirely accurate.
“Well, we're still the world leaders in terms of reported cases and deaths. But we know that many countries are not reporting accurately," said Jay Wolfson, a public health expert with USF Health. "China is not reporting accurately. Iran is certainly not reporting accurately. Brazil is barely reporting.”
But either way, he says the new case milestone is alarming: "It's like, I don't really care what other people do at this point. I care about us, and 5 million is a lot of people”
In Florida, public health professionals hope we are seeing a shift.
“We are kind of hovering in this range of between seven (thousand) and 10,000 cases a day, something-hundred deaths plus a day. If we can push that rate down, it's very important," Wolfson said.
It's moving in the right direction, but far from being out of the woods.
“So I'm delighted that the case rate has gone down a bit," Wolfson said. "This is really good news. But let's not get carried away. We're still in the midst of an extremely dangerous pandemics that is highly contagious.”
With school around the corner, Wolfson encourages everyone to be flexible.
"There's not an on-off switch. It's a dimmer. So we're going to watch every day every week as we move into the school season as we move into the autumn,” he said.
As we see outbreaks in specific areas, experts recommend scaling back movement in those places to prevent our percent positive rate from climbing.
“We’ve been between eight to twelve percent in Hillsborough County, and we need to be below 5 percent," Wolfson said. "Because that demonstrates that it remains stable below that World Health Organization ceiling level.”
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