97% of Florida’s COVID hospitalizations have the highly infectious Delta variant

Florida – Florida’s COVID hospitalizations have broken daily records for 11 straight days. There were more than 15,000 admissions on Wednesday.

According to Jackson Health System President and CEO Carlos Migoya, his employees are holding up well under the crush of COVID patients.

They say Jackson has about 1,200 patients in total at its seven hospitals, 384 of them have the coronavirus.

According to Migoya, analysis of those COVID patients showed that approximately 97 percent have the highly infectious Delta variant.

“The biggest fear for me is really the infection rates that are going on. And the fact that many people are out there and not really understanding the seriousness of this virus. Masking is extremely important, but I try to keep it to one thing – vaccination. We know the vaccination works. The difference from this year to last year, we didn’t have the vaccination. If people get vaccinated, we know there are breakthroughs, those people don’t get as sick. They just have, maybe, a bad cold. The people that are not vaccinated, it gets very serious and could have potentially a long impact from a lung perspective,” he said.

Migoya said Jackson has plenty of ventilators and is also making a great deal of progress in terms of vaccinating all of its employees.

The state has shattered single-day records for new coronavirus cases five times in the past two weeks, including Tuesday with 24,753 cases reported, according to the CDC.