Orange County Public Safety Director Danny Banks' comments came at the Board of County Commissioners meeting with Mayor Jerry Demings on Tuesday.
Banks says over the last week, the county added nearly 3,000 new coronavirus cases.
According to his report last Tuesday, the county built up about that same number of cases over two weeks.
"Again, just in the past week we’ve seen nearly 3,000 new cases in Orange County in the seven days. Now some of those numbers are generated by our increased testing, which I'll point to you in the bottom here, but that is concerning that we’ve had over 3,000 new cases in Orange County just in the last seven days.”
[audio wav="https://www.wmfe.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/danny-banks-clip-one.wav"][/audio]
Banks says demand for COVID-19 testing at the Barnett Park site alone has far exceeded expectations.
Staffers planned to do 4,000 tests a week there, but in the past seven days they administered 5,375 rapid and PCR tests combined.
He says they also passed out 183,725 face masks and 22,525 bottles of hand sanitizer at the site.
“As you’re already aware, within the past week we crossed several very large milestones for Orange County. We surpassed 50,000 total cases in Orange County and 600 deaths of our residents.”
[audio wav="https://www.wmfe.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/13006_TESTING_DANIELLE.wav"][/audio]
The rolling positivity rate over the past fourteen days in the county has increased to 7.63 percent.
If you'd like to listen to this story, click on the clips above.