The wave of cases that made Los Angeles the center of California’s surge in coronavirus is now being blocked in nearby suburban counties.
Over the past week, San Bernardino, Riverside and Orange counties have outperformed Los Angeles County in per capita case rates, the Los Angeles Times reported.
As of Wednesday, the three southern California counties reported case rates of 408, 391, and 399 cases per 100,000 residents, respectively, beating the rate of 372 Los Angeles County infections per 100,000 residents.
Meanwhile, cases in Los Angeles County continue to rise, setting a record one day on Thursday with more than 4,200 new cases, according to California public health data.
Officials in the three suburban counties made the decision to lift the mask orders, while Los Angeles kept his.
The waves reveal the shortcomings of California’s approach to giving localities relative discretion on how to proceed with plans to reopen the economy, undermining a uniform response and making it more difficult to contain outbreaks in a county.
It also highlights how a region’s politics can influence responses to a public health crisis, a divide illustrated by Donald Trump’s resistance to masks and his insistence that schools open for in-person instruction in the fall.
In Orange County, which emerged as a cradle of organized resistance to mandatory orders for masks, county education officials this week recommended that their schools return to in-person instruction in the fall, without masks, even as the two The state’s largest school districts, in Los Angeles and San Diego, said they would start the school year online.
While expert opinion is unanimous that wearing masks can delay the spread of the virus, some locations and individuals remain challenging. The former Orange County public health official issued a mask order, but she resigned after receiving a death threat and her replacement voided the order.
In Imperial County, neighboring Riverside to the south, medical professionals face a barrage of coronavirus cases that has reduced hospital resources.
Every day, 15-17 patients are flown out of the county to outside hospitals that can provide higher levels of care, director general of El Centro regional medical center told the Guardian.
California has recorded more than 356,000 coronavirus cases, at an average rate of 8,500 per day, and has attributed 7,345 deaths to the virus.
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