Los Angeles County reported another 14 coronavirus-related deaths and 1,343 new positive cases on Friday, March 3 — bringing the pandemic-era totals to 35,734 and 3,708,022, respectively.
Daily case numbers released by the county are undercounts of actual virus activity in the county, because of people who use at-home tests and don’t report the results — and others who don’t test at all.
The county’s test positivity rate was holding steady at 5.6%, about the same as a week ago.
The latest seven-day case rate stood at 62 new cases per 100,000 people, according to county figures — a decrease from the 69 new cases per 100,000 people a week earlier.
The number of COVID-19-positive patients in county hospitals was 658 on Friday, up 15 the day before. Of those patients, 81 were being treated in intensive care, up from 80 on Thursday.
Some of the patients were initially hospitalized for other reasons and learned they had COVID-19 after a mandated test.
The seven-day total for new COVID-19 hospital admissions per 100,000 people was 6.9 — about the same as the previous week’s 7.0 figure.
The health department also said that the seven-day average of staffed inpatient hospital beds was at 3.8% for COVID patients, down a hair from the previous week’s 3.9%.
The latest metrics came three days after the L.A. County Board of Supervisors agreed to end the county’s local COVID-19 emergency declarations at the end of March — while also warning that the move does not mean the virus no longer poses a threat.
“We don’t want to abandon those tools that got us to this place,” Supervisor Hilda Solis said earlier this week, “but with effective vaccines and testing abundantly available we can move on to the next phase of our response to COVID-19.”
Lifting the emergency declarations does not automatically mean that all COVID-19-related restrictions will immediately go away.
Public health Director Barbara Ferrer, in fact, said last week that her agency will review existing health officer orders, adding that some of the requirements in them were enacted under the county’s emergency declaration — but not all.
“So by the end of March, some of the health officer orders that were written here in L.A. County by Dr. (Muntu) Davis (the county health officer), would in fact need to be changed if they are going to continue, because some of them were done under an emergency declaration,” Ferrer said. “There are other health officer orders that aren’t done under emergency declaration.”
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One of the mandates set to be lifted is a requirement that people who are exposed to COVID-19 wear a mask for 10 days. Public health officials will review data to determine whether that requirement will continue under a revised health order, Ferrer said.
Some requirements — such as mandatory mask-wearing at health care facilities — are state orders, not county ones, she added.