FLORIDA, USA — Florida has hit a milestone no one wants to see this late in the pandemic.
Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows the number of new coronavirus cases in the Sunshine State has hit the highest level since the pandemic began.
Testing results for Dec. 23 show 31,758 new cases of COVID-19. The last time the state saw a number nearly as high was back on Aug. 26 when the CDC reports 27,668 people in Florida tested positive for the virus.
Up until this point, Florida had not reached the 30,000 range when it came to reported cases.
The rise in cases comes on the heels of the emergence of the omicron variant.
Omicron was originally detected in nearly 40 countries before it was first confirmed in the U.S. on Dec. 1. Since then, health officials in 40 states, including Florida, have confirmed their own cases of the variant.
Omicron, designated by the World Health Organization as a "variant of concern" in late November, was first reported in South Africa. Its country of origin is unclear.
President Joe Biden said shortly after the discovery that the variant is a cause for concern, not panic. He renewed his call for Americans to get COVID-19 booster shots. Health officials urged Americans to keep following standard COVID-19 precautions like social distancing and wearing masks indoors.
The World Health Organization said on Dec. 9 that early evidence suggests the omicron variant may be spreading faster than the highly transmissible delta variant but brings with it less severe coronavirus disease — but cautioned that it was only “anecdotal information."
Researchers have also been running models predicting there will be more cases with the omicron variant than we saw with the delta surge.
One model at the University of Florida points to cases peaking in February with cases reaching 30,000 a day. Even during the peak of the delta variant, we didn't hit that mark here in Florida.
USF Health Epidemiologist Jason Salemi says the way things are going, it's likely to continue to increase.
“A lot of people think because of omicron’s characteristics and because of the degree to which that what we do to try to block transmission from person to person — the mask-wearing, the social distancing, the avoiding big crowded indoor public settings, the degree to which we can get people optimally immunized through vaccination — I think those things, unfortunately, unless we change something pretty dramatically, I think the case numbers are going to go up a lot. And I don’t think it would be surprising to me if we got up near the delta case numbers or beyond,” USF Health Epidemiologist Jason Salemi said.