Florida finds more variant cases of COVID-19 in the United Kingdom, Brazil, and South America

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. – CDC’s updated COVID-19 case count shows that Florida has verified new cases of three different strains this week.

This includes two more cases of the UK variant detected since Sunday, two more cases of the Brazilian variant and an additional case of the variant initially identified in South Africa.

The latest totals show 1,042 cases from the UK (B.1.1.7) confirmed in Florida, 23 cases ranging from Brazilians (P.1) and 10 South Africans (B.1.351).

Infectious disease experts say the totals represent a relatively small percentage of the actual number of variant cases, as not all COVID-19 samples are sequenced to detect variants.

Florida remains the state with the most confirmed variant cases. Michigan is the only other state with over 900.

California, Texas and Massachusetts have over 400 and all other states are below this.

Announcements

Local 10 News has sent several requests to the Florida Department of Health for an updated breakdown of which counties the cases have been located.

Each time these figures have been published previously, they have shown that South Florida has by far the highest concentration of cases.

Experts fear that spring break visitors who gather in South Florida may join the outreach and then transport these variants to other communities.

The Orlando Sentinel sued the Department of Health last week for county information and showed that as of March 17, Broward had the most confirmed cases (307), followed by Miami-Dade (129) and County Palm Beach (75).

Monroe County had no verified variants at this time.

Announcements

These figures were before the CDC confirmed that Florida had approved 1,000 cases of total variants over the weekend, at the same time as the state approved 2 million COVID-19 cases in total.

To see the latest data on CDC variants, click here.