L.A. May Issue Countywide Emergency Order, Strict Measures, Says Mayor – Deadline

Los Angeles is now the epicenter of the Covid-19 pandemic. It is the most infected county of the most infected state in the most infected country in the world.

In the pandemic’s spring wave, New York held that distinction — and it still is the state to have seen the largest single daily number of deaths. But given that the tally of daily cases and hospitalizations continue to skyrocket in L.A. and the fact that ICU availability was 0% in Southern California on Thursday, Los Angeles is unfortunately catching up.

On Thursday, another 14,418 Covid-19 infections were confirmed in L.A. County. The new cases lifted the countywide cumulative total to 581,519. In a county of 10 million people, that means 1 in 20 residents has had the virus.

Even more shocking, Los Angeles County is now seeing more daily cases than entire countries, including onetime hotspots such as Spain, Mexico, Poland and Portugal.

L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti revealed Thursday evening that city testing results were “seeing a seven-day positivity rate of an alarming 19.6%. Some of our sites have a positivity rate as high as 30%,” he said. For L.A. County, the seven-day rate was 13.7%.”For comparison, at the very beginning of the pandemic, California-at-large had a 40% test positivity rate. But that was when the state was conducting about 2,000 tests a day. And since lower testing numbers tend to produce higher test positivity rates, for L.A. to have 19.6% test positivity even as it is now delivering nearly 41,500 tests a day is frightening.

In the past week, San Bernardino and Los Angeles counties have, respectively, registered 1,415 and 1,102 average daily cases per million residents. Those are the highest rates in the country among counties with at least 1 million residents. Riverside County has the fourth-highest daily cases per million. That data is per an aggregator of government statistics used by the CDC called USAFacts.

Source: L.A. May Issue Countywide Emergency Order, Strict Measures, Says Mayor – Deadline

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