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Los Angeles County has one foot in the most lenient category of the state’s COVID-19 reopening system, a momentous achievement for a region that was once so ravaged by the coronavirus it was considered the epicenter pandemic in California.
According to new state data released on Tuesday, the county’s coronavirus case rate – adjusted for the number of tests performed – fell to 1.9 new cases per day per 100,000 population, hitting the threshold to enter the last California yellow level.
The county will have to maintain its numbers next week to move forward.
“It’s so encouraging to see that the work we do together has such a profound effect on the health and well-being of people in all of our communities,” the LA County Director of Public Health said Monday, Barbara Ferrer, before the new state prioritization data unveiled.
Taking this next step will put an end to the county’s astonishing rise on the state reopening ladder. Only about six weeks ago, LA County exited the most restrictive purple level, in which domestic operations are suspended or severely restricted in a multitude of industries.
In the yellow level, the bottom rung of California’s four-tier color-coded plan, most businesses can operate indoors, with modifications.
LA County – home to about a quarter of all Californians – reflects in many ways and is helping to chart the course of the pandemic statewide.
Over the past week, California has reported an average of 1,871 new cases per day, down about 38% from two weeks ago, according to data compiled by The Times.
The number of cases has not been so low since last spring.
California’s latest seven-day rate of new coronavirus cases, 32.5 per 100,000, is the lowest of any state – and well below the national rate of 114.7, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The sharp drop in newly confirmed infections in the state also doesn’t appear to be a mirage resulting from a decrease in testing. Since March, the seven-day average of daily tests performed has hovered around 200,000.
Meanwhile, the proportion of those tests coming back positive has plummeted – to a seven-day rate of 1.2% as of Monday. During the darker days of the fall and winter wave, the statewide weekly positivity rate was approaching 15%.
The number of coronavirus-positive patients in California hospitals also continued to fall. As of Monday, there were 1,776, including 431 in intensive care. These two figures are among the lowest recorded during the entire pandemic.
As infections and hospitalizations drop, the number of Californians dying from COVID-19 is also declining. Over the past week, the state reported about 62 new deaths per day – a marked drop from the peak of the outbreak, when the daily death toll was typically several hundred, according to data from The Times.
Overall, California has recorded more than 3.7 million confirmed cases of the coronavirus and more than 61,100 residents have died from COVID-19.
Officials and experts say continued recent progress will depend on two main factors: more people get vaccinated and continued adherence to public health protocols that can prevent the coronavirus from gaining a foothold.
Residents only have to look at the situation unfolding in other parts of the globe, namely India, for an edifying tale of how quickly the pandemic can spiral out of control again.
“The scenes we see across the world will be terribly familiar to anyone who has suffered the outbreak in this county,” Ferrer said in a briefing. “And if our situation has improved so much since then, we are not immune to seeing this kind of situation again. We must use all the tools at our disposal to prevent this from happening. “
While it is heartwarming to see the declining death rate, “almost all of the people who die from COVID today would be alive if they were fully vaccinated,” she added.
“While this has been a scary year filled with unknowns about this new virus and frequently changing guidelines on everything from masks to wiping groceries, we know the three vaccines we use are very safe.” , Ferrer said.
CDC data shows that providers across California have administered 29.1 million total doses so far.
To date, 47.2% of Californians have received at least one dose and 28.8% are considered fully immunized, meaning they have received the required two doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna vaccine, or the vaccine. Johnson & Johnson in one recently taken over.
While it is true that “one dose offers some protection” against COVID-19, “it is not as high a level of protection as what two doses offer”, according to Ferrer, and officials of the health say it is essential that residents perform the required inoculation. hourly.
In LA County alone, nearly 278,000 people who received a first dose are late for their second injection, according to figures presented Monday by Ferrer. The recommended dose interval is three weeks for Pfizer-BioNTech and four weeks for Moderna.
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