Los Angeles County Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer announced Wednesday that the region had registered 4,825 new coronavirus infections. That’s a record number of new cases. The previous high was 4,592 on July 16.
However, Ferrer warned, “more than 2,000 of those cases stem from an accumulation of laboratory reports.” With that in mind, the director said, “Actually, we are about 1,000 cases higher than a month ago.”
Ferrer noted the same thing about COVID-19’s new death report. She said the death toll from the virus recorded in the past 24 hours was 91. The total number of deaths in the county since the pandemic began is now 4,516.
Despite the mitigating factors, it’s still a “higher death count than ever,” Ferrer said. The previous record for daily coronavirus-related deaths was 73, set on July 14.
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Los Angeles County Department of Health Services Director Dr. Christina Ghaly said, “We are now seeing a very gradual decrease in the number of hospitalizations.” The county model, he said, indicated a continuation of that in the next four weeks. She attributed that decrease to the pairing of reopening guidelines a few weeks ago.
Ghaly also said those actions “absolutely led to a decrease in the effective transmission rate” to 0.92. Any number less than 1 means that each infected person transmits the virus to less than another person.
Ghaly said the model now predicts that only 15 percent of county residents will be infected by December. If the reduction measures had not been taken, Ghaly says the model shows that about half of the county’s residents would have been infected during the same period.
After reporting an unusually low number of daily COVID-related deaths in the past 72 hours, California announced that it also announced a record number of deaths from coronavirus on Wednesday. The new high was 197. That’s a 20 percent jump from the previous high of 159, recorded last Friday.
State and local officials have said the figures were significantly lower recently due to delays caused by a new federal reporting process. As a result, Wednesday’s number may be a little inflated due to the results of daily tests.
That happens just two days after the governor announced in his daily press conference that the state’s Central Valley was the new main area of concern.
Los Angeles County officials on Tuesday reported a total of 2,708 new confirmed cases of COVID-19 numbers, and the county’s Department of Public Health announced 51 new deaths from the virus. The department said it anticipates receiving a backlog of cases in the coming days due to reporting delays, and three hospitals did not report data today.
With the new cases, the county has a total of 178,642 positive COVID-19 cases and 4,426 deaths to date. There are 2,051 current coronavirus-related hospitalizations as of Tuesday, with 18% of those patients on ventilators. Total hospitalizations decreased from the all-time high of 2,232 hospitalized patients on July 20, but increased from 2,017 on Monday.
And those numbers are incomplete due to delays in a new federally mandated reporting process that has local officials awaiting information from the state. “We believe there are still 6 hospitals [outstanding]”Ferrer said.
