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Officials in the state of California, a recent epicenter of the pandemic in the United States, lifted the regional stay-at-home order for the five regions on Monday, in light of expectations that the bed capacity of the intensive care unit would reach a key threshold in four weeks.
Trends are also moving in a positive direction in Los Angeles County, which has more than halved the number of daily positive cases since peaking earlier in January, said the director of public health of the county, Barbara Ferrer.
But she warned that the coronavirus variants posed a growing threat.
“They will become dominant and allow people to be infected more easily and lead to an outbreak,” Ferrer said, while urging residents to remain vigilant.
“Now would not be the time to think just because we reopen things looking rosy,” she said, stressing that asymptomatic spread is a problem. “We have to go through the next few weeks with caution. At many other times when we have reopened our areas we have actually seen a bump in our cases,” said Ferrer.
Lifting the order means a return to the four-tier reopening system, and Los Angeles County will lift restrictions on outdoor dining and a local curfew for non-essential workers on Friday, Ferrer said. But those reopenings will require security changes, and Ferrer said she plans to meet with restaurant workers and unions on Wednesday to discuss the changes.
Some elected officials questioned when the restrictions would be lifted in the state, but California Health and Human Services Secretary Dr Mark Ghaly said on Tuesday he believed it had been lifted “in good time”.
“This was not a regional home care order based solely on community transmission rates, it was really focused on what we would see in hospitals in a few weeks,” explained Dr Ghaly.
Limited vaccines and slow deployment
Another cause for concern is the limited supply of vaccines, Ferrer said.
Los Angeles County receives more than 168,000 doses of the vaccine each week, but this is too slowly decreasing the number of people – over 2 million people – who are currently eligible to be vaccinated, she said.
“Patience will be needed because we just don’t have enough doses,” she said. “We’re really limited with the supply right now. This is a problem at the federal level, the administration has promised both to be more transparent but also to quickly step up production, so that we can get more supply here in the county. “
The unpredictability of weekly doses makes it difficult to open appointments for vaccines beyond one week at a time, Ferrer said. The next two weeks will be “difficult,” she said.
Supply is limited statewide, but the California Department of Public Health said on Tuesday that a new system will be introduced to address criticism of the slow and inefficient dose rollout.
Beginning next month, all Californians in Phase 1B Level 1 will be able to schedule an appointment to receive the vaccine through a standardized system statewide. These people include healthcare workers, residents over 65, education and child care, emergency services, and food and agriculture workers.
Instead of counties and hospitals managing their own vaccine distribution systems, the state will now use a third-party administrator who will assign vaccines directly to suppliers to maximize distribution efficiency, they said.
“We have learned that to pick up the pace, we need to increase the scale of our efforts to ensure that the vaccine supply kicks in as soon as it arrives in the state,” Gov. Gavin Newsom said in a statement.
CNN’s Stella Chan and Sarah Moon contributed to this report.
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