About one in five coronavirus tests performed daily in L.A. County are coming back positive, an astounding rate that has instilled fire on residents and natives.
Friday was the worst day yet for COVID-19 fatalities in California, as well as in Los Angeles County.
There were 676 deaths were reported in the state Friday, including 318 in Los Angeles County, according to a Times survey of health agencies.
The figures easily top the previous single-day records: 575 deaths in California and 291 in L.A. County, both set on New Year’s Eve.
Before the pandemic, L.A. County saw an average of 170 deaths a day, due to everything from car crashes to homicides to heart attacks. The county now is “seeing, clearly, more deaths from COVID alone than all other causes combined,” said Dr. Paul Simon, chief science officer for the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health..
L.A. County has averaged 189 COVID-19 deaths a day over the past week. In early December, about 30 people in L.A. County were dying every day from COVID-19. Cumulatively, the county has reported 11,872 deaths.
With the holiday season over and officials expressing dismay at how many residents appear to have ignored calls not to travel or celebrate with those outside their households, “we anticipate numbers of hospitalizations and deaths will remain high throughout this month,” Simon said.
The case count has again started to tick up. The county on Friday recorded its fifth-highest daily number of new coronavirus infections: 17,827 — well above last week’s daily average of 14,000. “This very clearly is the latest surge from the winter holidays and New Year’s, no question about it,” Simon said .Even though hospitals across the state are already contending with record numbers of COVID-19 patients, “we do anticipate the worst of this is to hit in another week or 10 day and may continue into February,” said Carmela Coyle, president and chief executive of the California Hospital Assn.
“This has been unprecedented for our state, unprecedented for the nation, unprecedented for the world,” she said during a conference call. “But we find ourselves today, in terms of the numbers, at a point where we are standing on a beach and watching a tsunami approach.”
With hospital morgues overcrowded and overwhelmed funeral homes forced to turn families away, the L.A. County coroner’s office is accelerating efforts to temporarily store corpses.
