Another record-breaking day for Florida in terms of new COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations on Saturday

Fort Lauderdale, Florida – 23,903 new cases of COVID-19 were reported on Saturday in Florida.

“My biggest fear is that we’ll have a variant of high consequence, which is one that’s worse than the delta variant, which is already horrible,” said FIU Infectious Disease Expert Dr. Aileen Marty. “It’s absolutely heartbreaking, and it’s particularly heartbreaking because so many of the patients are younger individuals.”

The need for hospital beds In Broward County is rising significantly.

Almost all of Broward Health’s 300 COVID-19 patients have not been vaccinated.

“At this point, there’s still the people that are anti-vaccine,” said Broward Health Chief Medical Officer Dr. Joshua Lenchus. “Frankly, there’s nothing that we can do about those people, no science is going to convince them.”

In Miami-Dade County, a major announcement from Nicklaus Children’s Hospital to its staff, which read, in part:

“With the increasing number of adults and children in our community experiencing severe illness and hospitalization associated with the Delta variant, our course of action is clear. We have notified staff that we are now requiring all employees to become fully vaccinated. ”

Many workplaces are now requiring vaccines, but the state is making it tougher for mask mandates to be imposed.

Some local leaders have been very critical of Governor Ron DeSantis.

“He’s divided our community, so now mask usage, even vaccines, just simple healthy practices, have become political statements,” said Miami Beach Mayor Dan Gelber.

Gelber believes DeSantis is not taking the pandemic seriously and claims he is just trying to score political points.

“He’s playing politics right now in the middle of a pandemic,” said Gelber.