The Beacon, which has provided daily, weekly and biweekly reports of COVID-19 data for a year, is no longer able to track new cases in West Volusia cities.
Florida ceased providing daily updates on COVID-19 cases on June 4. The state has switched to a weekly report that uses a “cumulative case positivity” calculation.
This calculation compares everyone who is tested — even if one person is tested multiple times — to the number of new cases by week. The term “new cases” applies only to residents, whereas, previously, the numbers for residents and nonresidents were reported.
Also, the basic number of new cases weekly is provided only for Volusia County as a whole, rather than by city or ZIP code.
Other data sources have also stopped providing information: Volusia County Schools has taken down its dashboard, which provided biweekly updates on new cases among staff and students. The Florida Agency for Health Care Administration, whose dashboard showed the number of people hospitalized with the primary diagnosis of COVID-19, and available ICU hospital beds, has also stopped reporting those numbers.
The number of people who have died due to COVID-19 after June 4 is also unavailable.
The loss of public data prevents full visualization of the virus over time in the community, a valuable piece of the overall pattern.
It also prevents communities from tracking potential hot spots, or directly relating the number of vaccinations to declining cases in individual cities.
Instead, new weekly state reports focus mostly on vaccination rates. According to that data, 51 percent of Volusia County residents over the age of 12 have been vaccinated. Those numbers include people who have received only one dose of the two-dose series provided by Pfizer and Moderna, as well as those who have had both doses or one-dose vaccines.
As of June 3, total cases since reporting began:
Volusia: 44,977
Astor: 1
Cassadaga: 3
Barberville: 10
DeBary: 1,612
DeLand: 5,902
DeLeon Springs: 453
Deltona: 7,995
Enterprise: 54
Glenwood: 6
Lake Helen: 223
Orange City: 2,083
Osteen: 214
Pierson: 390
Seville: 126
Total deaths: 846
Cases in Volusia Schools:
1,489 students
689 employees
Stetson University
Total cases: 452
How many had it?
Percentage of population that has/had COVID-19 as of June 3 (comparing cases to population based on U.S. Census data as of 2019):
Volusia County: 8.12 percent
DeBary: 7.5 percent
DeLand: 16.93 percent
DeLeon Springs: 15.9 percent
Deltona: 8.61 percent
Lake Helen: 8 percent
Orange City: 16.8 percent
Pierson: 27 percent
Note: City data reported by the Florida Department of Health was generated by the self-reports of people who were tested. In Pierson, for instance, those who technically live outside of city limits may have identified as living in the Town of Pierson.
Vaccine info
Total vaccinated: 249,935 (approximately 45.3 percent of the county’s population of 552,328)
