The grim toll of Florida's summer surge of COVID-19 continued to mount Friday as state officials on Friday reported another 1,719 deaths attributed to the virus.

Late Friday the Florida Department of Health released its latest COVID-19 Weekly Situation Report showing Florida's pandemic death toll had reached 55,299 since the pandemic began in March, 2020. That total indicates another 1,719 deaths were tabulated in the past seven days.

Prior to this summer, Florida had never recorded as many as 1,300 new COIVID-19 deaths in a single week. With Friday's report, Florida has exceeded that level for seven consecutive weekly reports.

The latest report shows that 16,220 Floridians' deaths have been recorded since the end of July. That means for that stretch an average of more than 250 fatalities have been reported per day. That chronicles Florida's most dire news of the 2021 summer surge's worst period, driven by the emergence of the more infectious delta variant.

Almost 30% of all of the COVID-19 deaths recorded in Florida during the 19-month pandemic have been tabulated just in the past nine weeks.

Florida's more immediate trends are hopeful however, according to the latest report.

Florida's most recent update showed a sharp drop from the 2,000-plus COVID-19 fatalities that had been recorded in each of the previous four weeks.

More dramatically, the same report showed the number of newly-confirmed COVID0-19 cases fell again — dramatically — with just 37,299 tallied since the state's previous report was issued on Sept. 24. There had been 54,109 the week before.

The latest report offered the lowest weekly total of new COVID-19 cases since mid-July, providing confirmation that the worst of the latest outbreak is long past, except for dealing with the record numbers of deaths that resulted.

Florida was posting more than 150,000 new cases per week through the last three weeks in August. September was nothing like that.

Friday's report was the fifth consecutive weekly report that showed significant declines in new cases.