Florida finds more COVID-19 variant cases in the UK, Brazil and South America

FORT LAUDERDALE, Florida. – CDC’s updated count of COVID-19 variant cases shows that Florida has seen new occurrences of three separate strains this week.

This includes two more cases of the UK variant detected since Sunday, two more cases of the Brazilian variant and an additional case of the variant initially identified in South Africa.

The latest totals show 1,042 cases in the United Kingdom (B.1.1.7) confirmed in Florida, 23 variant cases in Brazil (P.1) and 10 in South Africa (B.1.351).

Infectious disease experts say the totals represent a relatively small percentage of the actual number of variant cases, as not all samples of COVID-19 are sequenced to detect variants.

Florida remains the state with the majority of confirmed variant cases. Michigan is the only other state with more than 900.

California, Texas and Massachusetts each have more than 400 and all other states are below that.

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Local 10 News sent several requests to the Florida Department of Health for an updated breakdown of which counties the variant cases were located.

Each time these figures were released earlier, they showed that South Florida has, by far, the highest concentration of cases.

Experts fear that spring break visitors gathered in South Florida may increase the spread and then further transport these variants to other communities.

Orlando Sentinel sued the health department last week for county-by-county information and showed that on March 17, Broward had the most confirmed variant cases (307), followed by Miami-Dade (129) and Palm County Beach (75).

Monroe County had no variant verified at that time.

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These figures came before the CDC confirmed that Florida had approved a total of 1,000 cases of variants over the weekend, at about the same time that the state exceeded 2 million cases of COVID-19.

To see data for the most recent CDC variants, click here.