The threat of the coronavirus spreading to work is still very real, according to Los Angeles County Health Officer Dr. Muntu Davis, made clear on Thursday, August 13, while discussing some of the biggest outbreaks the agency has investigated since the pandemic began.
Those who posted the latest news at SoFi Stadium, in Inglewood, have seen 77 people among their ranks test positive for the virus.
At 10 UPS locations countywide, 84 employees have been confirmed with COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus.
Trojan Battery Company, in Santa Fe Springs, has infected 61 employees on two sides with COVID-19. Three were taken to hospital and one person died.
And that’s just the beginning. In all, county officials have been investigating more than 1,400 outbreaks since March – with 891 still ongoing, Davis said.
“We continue to see breakthroughs in manufacturing facilities, food processing facilities or warehouses where people can access personal protective equipment,” Davis said during a briefing Thursday afternoon. “We’ve seen what happens when protections in the workplace are not in place.”
Davis also stressed how important it was for employers to warn the Department of Public Health if they have at least three cases of the coronavirus among workers.
The health officer discussed these outbreaks on the same day that the province announced 64 additional deaths and 1,999 new cases. Roughly 300 of the cases reported Thursday came from a backlog of cases through the state’s overburden.
A total of 5,171 people died from coronavirus complications and 216,139 people tested positive. While the rate of infection has decreased in recent weeks, the province remains on the state’s monitoring list and remains accountable for about half of cases and deaths statewide.
The afternoon’s report did not include updated figures for Long Beach and Pasadena, which operate their own health departments. Pasadena reported 32 new cases, bringing the total to 2,178, but added no deaths to a total of 111. Long Beach reported 142 more cases, for a total of 9,425, and one more death from coronavirus, for a total of 188.
In early July, the province began to see an increase in coronavirus cases and hospitalizations. Much of the increase has been driven by outbreaks in the workplace – resulting in poor and minority communities being hit hardest, Davis said.
At its peak in July, for example, hospitalization rates among Latinos were nearly four times those of white residents – and death rates were roughly five times higher. Black people meanwhile have roughly two to three times higher rates of hospitalization than white residents. And although all hospitalization rates have dropped, those differences still exist, Davis said.
Similar inequalities exist when comparing wealth. Those in the areas with the highest poverty die about four times that of people in the richest areas, Davis said.
“One reason we see health inequalities is simply to deal with the makeup of our essential workers,” Davis said. “We are more likely to see labor force exposures among residents working in low-wage enterprises because they are less likely to be able to work from home and are more likely to have to deal with working conditions that are not conducive to keeping them safe from infection. . “
However, investigating the outbreaks is not easy.
In SoFi Stadium, for example, the situation was complicated by the high number of sub-companies. The workers who tested positive there, Davis said, came from 33 subcontractors, eight of whom reported three or more cases. The number of cases from SoFi has been steadily increasing in recent weeks, although employers are cooperating, Davis said.
“They are in compliance and on top of the overall management of health care, including contact tracing,” Davis said.
County investigators have linked three of the 10 UPS outbreaks to the workplace, Davis said, with officials investigating the other. UPS centers that reported positive cases included those in Los Angeles, Bell, Gardena, Vernon, Cerritos, Sylmar and Van Nuys.
“We can say if two cases were linked in some way that could have probably spread the infection,” Davis said, “but we can not always tell where it originated.”
Previous investigations into 10 positive UPS employees at seven locations in June found that they were not tied to the work floor at the time and were likely to be recruited in the community, Davis said.
Coronavirus is unlikely to spread through the mail or packages, he added.
Along with traces of contacts from reported outbreaks, Davis said, the Department of Public Health has received more than 21,000 complaints about compliance and investigated cases at nearly 32,000 workplace locations since March, including nearly 21,000 restaurants, more than 4,700 food markets and more than 3,600 unregulated companies.
“As a community, we need to be able to protect public health,” Davis said. “We can not sustain our way out of this pandemic.”
