The average number of daily new Covid infections in Los Angeles County has jumped by just about 300% over the past month and roughly 25% in the past week alone.
Today, they topped 3,000 for the first time since mid-February. One month ago, the number of daily cases in L.A. was 1,060. But the increase has not translated to a meaningful rise in local hospitalizations or deaths thusfar.
County Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer expressed hope that, given four weeks of rising cases with only a small uptick of hospitalizations, L.A.
might avoid a subsequent wave of hospitalizations and deaths such as the one it saw in last winter’s Omicron wave.Asked whether the current jump in daily cases could be considered a “sixth wave” of the pandemic in the county Ferrer said, “I’m comfortable with you characterizing this as a wave.” But, she said, if it is a wave it is different than the others so far.“All of our waves have seen an increase in hospitalizations and deaths and it’s four weeks now and we haven’t seen either of those,” observed the public health director. “I don’t think we have enough data points…It’s certainly an increase…I hope that we don’t see exponential growth [in cases].”She said that Angelenos need to be “keeping our masks on a little more than we were a few weeks ago.” Ferrer continued, “We think that’ll make the difference.
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