Sustaining its record-shattering week, the state of Florida posted 9,585 fresh COVID-19 cases - breaking its record of 8,942 cases from the previous day. Florida's total number of cases is now pegged at 132,545.
According to the Florida Department of Health, hospitalizations have reached 14,136. Almost 3,400 people have perished from the virus in Florida.
The state surpassed its own record for new daily cases in the last few days. Also on Friday, Florida smashed its own testing record, conducting over 78,000 tests. Conservative politicians, including US President Donald Trump and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis blamed the higher testing levels for the recent spikes.
Florida is one of Sun Belt states like Arizona. Texas and California, where cases have spiked in the past week, prompting authorities to slow down business reopenings.
Mayor Carlos Gimenez of Miami-Dade County said late Friday that the city's iconic beaches will be closed down for Independence Day holidays. In a statement, the mayor said the five-day suspension will be extended beginning July 3 if conditions in the state do not change.
Some medical experts first postulated that the second wave of cases of coronavirus would hit the US when winter comes later this year alongside seasonal flu - but many are now wondering if there is already a second outbreak.
After spending the better half of two months sheltering in place, Americans are eager to return to work and their normal routines, with governors rolling back stay-at-home orders in virtually every state while following new guidelines from Centers for Disease Control on reopening non-essential businesses.
The dramatic increase in cases over the past few weeks in Florida, and other states, can be seen in the internal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention maps. Those maps, part of CDC's daily monitoring shows that around one month earlier many areas in Florida were marked in blue, orange, and yellow, indicating they were in a downward trajectory for coronavirus cases.
Now nearly all of Florida is covered in red, indicating that those counties of the state are seeing no downward trajectory. The maps also show substantially fewer regions across the US trending down than there just a month ago.
Despite DeSantis maintaining that his administration is not looking at reimposing stay-at-home mandates, many non-essential establishments in Florida are already shutting down at the owners' discretion because of the big increases in local COVID-19 transmission.
The same holds true for food businesses and bars in other states, like Iowa, according to reports from the Des Moines Register, and in Arizona, where large surges in new coronavirus cases in Phoenix in particular are too critical to ignore, per the Arizona Republic.
