Los Angeles County Director of Public Health Barbara Ferrer reported that the county currently has 2,232 patients hospitalized due to the coronavirus. The previous maximum was 2,216, established just the previous day. “This is the 4th day of last week that we reported the highest number of hospitalizations due to COVID-19,” he said.
This is the fourth consecutive day of hospitalization with more than 2,100 confirmed cases, and data indicates that younger people between the ages of 18 and 40 are hospitalized at a higher rate than that observed at any point in the pandemic.
Ferrer did not say how many ICU beds the county had available, which is a constant information hole in his daily press conferences. ICU bed statistics, when county officials give them to you, are reported as a percentage of general hospitalizations, with no sense of remaining capacity.
On Saturday, for example, the county reported 2,188 hospitalized cases, with “28 percent of ICU confirmed cases and 18 percent confirmed ventilator cases.”
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That blind spot becomes more maddening when, as he often does, Mayor Eric Garcetti emphasized Friday that the county has a critically low level of ICU beds, with only 102 existing. “We are about to move to double digits, rolling out the double digits of our available beds in the ICU, for the first time since I have been giving these reports,” said the mayor.
The ICU bed count conflicts with data from the county’s COVID-19 dashboard on Thursday showing that there was a 3-day average of 1,389 beds available in the ICU out of a total of approximately 4,800. The deadline was reported. He was contacted by county officials for an explanation and received a power-of-document document stating that Thursday, there were 129 beds left in the ICU. There was no explanation for the discrepancy between the county board number, which is still in effect, and Garceti’s number.
On Sunday, Public Health reported that the test positivity rate increased from 9% to 10%, even as the number of tests increased. On Monday, she said that number had dropped to 8 percent.
There were 3,160 new cases of COVID-19 in the past 24 hours. The county now averages over 3,000 new cases per day in the past 7 days. The total number of cases identified in the region since the pandemic broke out is 159,045.
“Without a doubt,” Ferrer said Monday, “the main driver of the increase we are experiencing today is easy to identify: people interact with each other and do not adhere to recommended prevention measures.”
Ferrer reported 9 COVID-related deaths. “We often see low numbers being reported to us over the weekend,” said Ferrer. That brings the number of coronavirus-related deaths to 4,104 people in Los Angeles County.
When asked if the region had been opened too early, County Supervisor Katheryn Barger said, “Everything the county has done has met the state’s guidelines.” She attributed the current spikes to Memorial Day meetings, protests, and noncompliance with best practices recommended by the Health Department.
At his press conference Friday, Governor Gavin Newsom ordered counties on the state’s coronavirus watch list to close school campuses this fall, at least to start the school year. The 32 (now 33) counties on the list, which include Los Angeles and most of southern California, should switch to virtual instruction only. The state’s two largest districts, Los Angeles Unified and San Diego Unified, had already announced plans to start the new academic year with online-only courses.
The mandate applies to both private and public schools, according to Newsom.
To physically reopen schools, counties must meet state certification requirements. Los Angeles, Orange, Ventura, San Diego and Riverside counties are on the watch list.
Shortly after Newsom’s announcement, the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health announced that it would direct the region to follow the governor’s example.
