The number of detected COVID-19 cases has been flat or going up for the last five weeks. The latest week had a 50% increase (from 1002 cases to 1503 cases), up from a low of 673 cases in the second week of November.
Orange County FL’s new case positivity rate is 4.5% (below the Florida State average of 5.4% in the same time period), but is almost certainly going to go above 5% next week.     This increase can be attributed partially to the new Omicron variant, and partially to the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays.

In the last six weeks the OCPS dashboard has reported only 615 new cases. Schools do not appear to be a primary driver of infections, and they will be closed for the next two weeks.

This chart, from a story in the Orlando Sentinel shows the sharp upward increase occurring across Florida.

It appears that Orange County is about one week “behind” the average, so I   expect our curve to also take a sharp upward spike in the next weekly report from the FL-DOH (Scheduled for December 24th, but likely be delayed until after Christmas).

In this chart from the FL-DOH report, you can see how Florida overall had a very sharp spike in the last week, with a more than doubling of cases and case positivity percent:

According to the FL-DOH report, Orange County has 73% of it’s 5+ population vaccinated [Compared to a statewide average of 70%]. Vaccination offers strong protection from severe illness and death, but only partial protection from being infected by the Omicron variant. So I expect the case numbers to bump up (but not as high as with the Delta surge), but hopefully the death numbers will be smaller than from the Delta surge.