White House says 1 in 5 new COVID-19 cases are in Florida

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One in five COVID-19 cases over the past two weeks has been detected in Florida, a White House adviser said Thursday.

Jeff Zients, the Biden administration’s coronavirus response coordinator, said that the Sunshine State accounted for around 20 percent of the entire country’s new confirmed cases.

“For the second week in a row, one in five of all cases occurring in Florida alone — and within communities, these cases are primarily among unvaccinated people,” Zients said at a press briefing.

Meanwhile, around 40 percent of new infections this week came from just three states — Florida, Texas and Missouri, Zients said.

Currently, around 47 percent of people in Florida are fully vaccinated against the virus — lower than the national average of nearly 49 percent, according to the Mayo Clinic.

A White House adviser stated one out of every five COVID-19 cases over the past two weeks has been in Florida.Getty Images

Meanwhile, Texas and Missouri have only fully vaccinated around 43 percent and 40 percent of their populations, respectively, the data shows.

In New York, just over 56 percent of its population is fully immunized against the virus.

“Importantly states with the highest case rate are actually seeing their vaccine vaccination rates go up,” Zients said, adding that Florida had a higher vaccination rate last week than the national average.

Florida has had one of the most relaxed approaches to the coronavirus pandemic.

It was among the last states to impose a coronavirus lockdown at the start of the pandemic — then quickly began reopening in the first week of May 2020, when it lifted its stay-at-home order. 

Texas also had one of the swiftest reopenings, with the state first lifting restrictions on May 1, 2020  — while Missouri began to lift its lockdown the following month.

New York began lifting its COVID-19 restrictions in mid-June last year, after Cuomo ended the state’s stay-at-home order. 

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Thursday said that the seven-day average of new cases in the US was up 53 percent over the previous week — with the Delta variant comprising around 83 percent of infections nationwide.

“It is clear that we’re experiencing what many other countries are experiencing — increased case counts driven by the more transmissible Delta variant,” Zients said.

But Zients stressed that vaccines provided sufficient protection against the variant.

“The good news is that current scientific evidence shows that our current vaccines are working as they did in clinical trials, even against the Delta variant,” he said.