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The latest wave of COVID-19 shows signs of slowing down in Los Angeles County, but cases are expected to continue to rise in the coming weeks as the hyper-transmissible variant Delta continues to emerge as a major threat, a said Los Angeles County’s top health official. Tuesday.
Public health director Barbara Ferrer said she expects recorded infections to increase in part due to increased testing when schools, colleges and universities welcome students for the new trimester.
“A lot of these sites have regular drug tests, many of them have an entry testing requirement, which means tens of thousands more people will be tested every day,” Ferrer told the council. county surveillance.
This likely means that people who otherwise wouldn’t have thought of getting tested could end up finding out they have an asymptomatic infection, adding to the county’s number of cases.
“This means that for the months of August and September, we’re probably going to see our number of cases climb,” Ferrer said.
Perhaps a more telling metric, she said, will be the positivity rate: the proportion of tests done that confirm coronavirus infection.
Although the raw number of cases can fluctuate significantly depending on the tests, a low rate of positivity would indicate that transmission may not be accelerating. As of Tuesday, the countywide daily test positivity rate was 4.4%.
A week ago, the rate was 6.6%.
While the number of cases is still on the rise in LA County, there is some evidence that the rate of increase may start to stabilize. In the week ending Sunday, the county reported a total of 20,979 new coronavirus cases – a modest 6.5% increase from the previous week’s total of 19,704. By comparison, that total of 19,704 was an increase of 22% from the previous week.
There are several factors that are likely contributing to the current slowdown, Ferrer said, but one that appears to be making a difference is the county’s reinstatement of a requirement in mid-July that all residents wear face masks in all areas. indoor public places.
By the time that order went into effect, Ferrer said cases across the county were doubling about every 10 days.
“Masking remains an effective way to reduce transmission,” she said.
LA County was ahead of the curve in issuing a new mask warrant. And in the weeks that followed, cases grew more slowly in the region than in the rest of the state.
For the week ending Sunday, California outside LA County reported a total of 55,422 cases – a 20% increase from the previous week, according to figures presented by Ferrer. The previous week’s total of 46,096 was a 57% jump from the previous week.
In LA County, hospitalizations have doubled in the past 15 days, from 745 on July 24 to 1,503 on Sunday – the region’s worst number since the final days of the devastating wave of fall and winter. winter.
Data continues to show that the vast majority of people infected with, and ultimately hospitalized with, COVID-19 are not vaccinated.
For the week of July 31, the average rate of coronavirus cases among unvaccinated Californians was 33 per 100,000 population per day, nearly five times the comparable rate of vaccinated individuals.
As of last week, the risk of being hospitalized for COVID-19 in LA County was 19 times higher among those who are not fully vaccinated than those who are, Ferrer said.
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