For the first time since the beginning of August, Florida has recorded fewer than 1,000 additional COVID-19 deaths in a week.

The latest COVID-19 Weekly Situation Report from the Florida Department of Health added 944 COVID-19 deaths to the state's toll. That's down from 1,192 fatalities recorded the previous week and considerably below the worst-ever week of 2,468, which the state recorded in the third report of September.

The new state report, released late Friday, was the first since the state's Aug. 6 dispatch to record fewer than 1,000 additional COVID-19 deaths statewide. The new status closes a tragic ten-week run of four-figure weekly tallies of Floridians who had perished because of the disease.

The drop in fatalities at last signals the worst is over from the delta variant-driven summer surge, which peaked in COVID-19 infections from late July through early September. That has led to a surge in death reports rising and now falling a few weeks behind those new case tallies.

Floria reported just 14,564 newly-confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the week running through Thursday. That's the lowest weekly count of new cases seen in the state since June.

Florida has seen declines in cases eight consecutive weeks, and now has returned to the level seen throughout the spring — before the regency of the delta variant, and back when Florida had felt normal again. At the worst, a three week stretch in August, Florida was struggling with more than 150,000 new cases every week.

The weekly caseload of new cases is down 90% since then.

Nonetheless, Friday's latest weekly tally of deaths caused by the disease still was significantly high in the longer-term scheme of the now 19-month long coronavirus pandemic.

Throughout the spring, Florida was typically reporting 200-500 new COVID-19 deaths per week. The same was true last fall, after the summer surge of 2020 had waned and before the winter surge began. The same was true in Florida in the spring of 2020, until the summer, 2020, surge began.

This summer, Florida saw newly-reported tallies of COVID-19 deaths begin to spike in the first week of August, when the state recorded 616 fatalities, compared with 409 the prior week, and 281 the week before that.

Assuming that first week of August marked the beginning of the death toll and Friday's report marks the end, 19,724 Floridians were reported to have died because of the disease during the 12-week summer surge of 2021.

Since the start of the pandemic in March, 2020, 58,803 Floridians have died of COVID-19, according to the Florida Department of Health.