ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. — Coronavirus cases in Florida are hitting a high, but public health professionals are finding hope in another metric.
“Yeah, so those total case numbers were pretty shocking. So 15,000-plus cases, that's pretty terrifying. But there was a little bit of a silver lining kind of hiding in that data," said Dr. Jill Roberts with the University of South Florida Public Health.
That silver lining: percent positivity for new cases is down to 11.25 percent.
This is the first time since June 25 that percent positivity has gone below 12 percent.
“Even more important, maybe, is the percent positivity among new people. So new tests, they actually went down too," Roberts said.
Percent positivity has been going down for much of this week. On Thursday, percent positivity for new cases was at 18.35 percent. And now we are below 12 percent after a few days below 13 percent.
"This is trending in the right direction, it could indicate that maybe we're starting to stabilize," Roberts said.
But stabilizing at this point is not exactly what health care professionals want.
"This is a little bit of a positive sign, but that doesn't mean it disappeared. There are still 15,000 cases out there," Roberts said.
There is still a lot of room to improve, Roberts explains: "Ideally, we know we're doing enough testing if our present positivity is under 10 percent, but even better 5 percent.
"We're nowhere near that. So we're better, but we're still way, way too high."
And Roberts says this needs to happen sooner rather than later, because the fall is fast approaching, and with it, flu season. And there are concerns across Tampa Bay about managing both COVID-19 and the flu at the same time.
"It's really kind of terrifying to think what happens if we have both a coronavirus and an influenza virus circulating at the same time," she said.
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