Despite disturbing numbers of young people dying from COVID-19, the Los Angeles County Chief Medical Officer said Thursday that new cases of coronavirus could subside soon enough to allow officials to grant exemptions to open elementary schools.
During an online news conference, Dr. Jeffrey Gunzenhauser points out that exemptions can be sought to open schools if cases are below 200 for every 100,000 people for two weeks.
In the last two weeks, officials have reported 27,739 new cases, which amounts to 275 per 100,000, but Gunzenhauser said that number is slowly declining.
“We believe we can get less than 200 in the very near future,” he said.
The Los Angeles Unified School District continued with classes this week, but instruction was done remotely. There are extensive requirements for applying for exemptions, and health hospital officials must approve applications.
Gunzenhauser gave a generally optimistic briefing on the state of the pandemic in LA County. He said the length of average hospital stays for COVID-19 has decreased from a few months ago, probably due to improved understanding of how to treat the disease.
He said more young people are now being hospitalized for the disease, and that they are also likely to recover faster than older patients.
But he warned that younger people are dying from the disease, and the percentage of people aged 18 to 29 hospitalized for COVID-19 has doubled to 10%.
Of the approximately 5,400 people in the province who died from COVID-19, 440 were aged 18 to 41 with no underlying health conditions, he said.
The underlying conditions that make patients most at risk for serious illness and death are hypertension, which is common among those 65 and older, and diabetes, a condition that affects 10% of the population. province, he said.
He also reported a positive trend in knowledgeable nursing homes, where widespread testing and protective equipment are now stemming infections.
The province now has about nine deaths in nursing homes a week, two-thirds down from a height of 27 in April, he said.
The number is “still too much,” he said, “but it seems our measures are working.”
There have been 13,120 COVID-19 infections among health workers and first responders in the province. Two-thirds of them are women, nearly half are Latino, and more than half are between 18 and 40, he said.
More than 37% of those infected were nurses.
