LA May Issue Countywide Emergency Ordinance, Strict Measures, Says Mayor – Deadline

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

In the spring wave of the pandemic, New York City held this distinction – and it is still the state that has seen the highest daily number of deaths. But with the number of daily cases and hospitalizations continuing to skyrocket in Los Angeles and the availability of intensive care at 0% in Southern California on Thursday, Los Angeles is sadly catching up. .

As of Thursday, 14,418 other Covid-19 infections were confirmed in LA County. The new cases brought the county’s cumulative total to 581,519. In a county of 10 million people, that means one in 20 people have contracted the virus.

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Even more shockingly, Los Angeles County now sees more daily cases than entire countries, including one-off hot spots such as Spain, Mexico, Poland and Portugal.

LA Mayor Eric Garcetti revealed Thursday night that the city’s test results “showed an alarming 19.6% 7-day positivity rate. Some of our sites have a positivity rate as high as 30%, ”he says. For LA County, the 7-date rate was 13.7%. “

For comparison, at the very start of the epidemic, California as a whole had a 40% test positivity rate. But that was when the state was doing about 2,000 tests a day. And as lower test numbers tend to produce higher test positivity rates, it’s frightening for LA to have 19.6% test positivity even though it now provides almost 41,500 tests. per day.

Over the past week, San Bernardino and Los Angeles counties recorded 1,415 and 1,102 average daily cases per million population, respectively. These are the highest rates in the country. Riverside County has the fourth highest number of daily cases per million. This data comes from a government statistics aggregator used by the CDC called USAFacts.

The pandemic struck home for Garcetti on Thursday. The mayor revealed his nine-year-old daughter tested positive for Covid-19. “Maya is fine and her symptoms are mild,” Garcetti said of her daughter. “My wife and I were both tested and our results came back negative,” he said, before adding that he himself was in quarantine.

“Our family is extremely careful and what’s happening at my house this week is being played out in Los Angeles and in this country,” Garcetti said.

The mayor said hospital officials were telling him and his staff that if Los Angeles continues its upward trend in COVID-19 hospitalizations through Christmas, medical facilities “ will fall into disrepair. failure ”, which means that they will not be able to properly care for patients with coronavirus or patients with other conditions.

He also said a “system-wide crisis” may need to be declared and a county-wide emergency order may be issued if hospitals remain inundated with patients.

“Some hospitals can convert[intensive care unit] Garcetti said, adding that ambulances sometimes need to be rerouted if a hospital is at full capacity. It is if there is capacity elsewhere. Some Southern California ambulances had to wait 5 and 7 hours outside the ER to deliver patients.

An emergency declaration, Garcetti said, could force the county to pass tougher measures on businesses and order more closures to ensure that “we don’t have to have these heartbreaking visions of doctors deciding who gets that latest fan and who doesn’t.

Garcetti said if current trends continue over the next three to five weeks, the county’s health care system “will have nothing left.”

City News Service contributed to this story.

You can watch the mayor’s press conference below.



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