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As of this morning, a record 11,515 Floridians are currently hospitalized with COVID-19 as the Delta variant continues to tear through the state.

Hospitals are reporting younger and healthier patients than in previous waves.

Florida COVID hospitalizations grew by more than 1,100 over night.

At Tallahassee Memorial Hospital in the state’s capital city, 66 of the 70 COVID patients are unvaccinated.

“We’re dealing with something that could have been prevented,” said Dr. Dean Watson with TMH.

And hospital officials said the demographics of the patients they’re seeing are quite different than they’d seen in past waves.

“It’s now attacking a younger population, individuals that are on the surface healthier,” said TMH Chief Clinical Officer Ryan Smith.

Mary Mayhew, President of the Florida Hospital Association told us the entire state is seeing a similar trend.

“It is absolutely attacking younger individuals more aggressively and putting them in the hospital than previous COVID,” said Mayhew.

According to the CDC 60 Floridians are dying a day from COVID.

While that’s about three times what we were experiencing at the start of July, it’s significantly lower then the almost 200 Floridians who were dying each day in last year’s summer and winter spikes.

“Hopefully we will not see the rate of deaths as we experienced in the previous surges,” said Mayhew.

As for how long this new wave will last, some medical professionals are looking to data coming out of the United Kingdom, which was hit by the Delta variant about a month before the US began seeing cases spike.

“You know they’re trending down now. We hope to see a trend down over the next four to five weeks,” said Dr. Watson.

And as cases and hospitalizations have increased the state has seen an uptick in Floridians getting vaccinated.

More than 330,000 got a shot last week.

Currently 61 percent of eligible Floridians have gotten at least one shot of the COVID vaccine.