Covid In Los Angeles Making A Measured Comeback As LAUSD Students Return To Campus

Tom Tapp
·4 min read
18

It’s been more than four months since Los Angeles County’s Covid State of Emergency officially ended, and a lot has changed. People have stopped wearing masks, public places are bustling again and even the most cautious public officials have relaxed their rhetoric. Most importantly, unlike the previous three years, there was no significant summer spike in cases. Fall, however, may be a slightly different story.

Anecdotally, we’re hearing of more infections over the past few weeks. Indeed, the L.A. County Public Health website lists outbreaks in the production of Fox’s The Masked Singer and at Warner Bros.’ Ivy Station offices in Culver City. It’s unclear how large these outbreaks were or when exactly they happened because the Public Health tracker no longer offers that information.

More from Deadline

In an email sent out this past weekend, the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health reported “small increases in COVID-19 indicators over the past four weeks indicating increased transmission,” although the statement also stressed that “overall metrics remain at a low level of concern.”

Very true. The trend is, however, steadily upward for the first time in months, with average daily cases in Los Angeles rising 64% between July 19 and August 9. Again, the numbers are low, rising from 202 average daily cases in July to 333 last week. That’s a fraction of what was seen over most of 2020, 2021 and 2022, but higher than the 195 daily cases reported when the state of emergency was lifted in May.

One factor that could help prevent the spread is the fact that with both SAG and the WGA on strike, film and TV production in Los Angeles is largely at a standstill. That means thousands fewer maskless people are in close proximity every day. (The industry’s Covid protocols ended on May 11.)

Test positivity is also rising. While, again, nowhere near the 22% that metric peaked at during the height of the pandemic, the 10.5% reported on August 1 is more than double what it was six weeks prior on June 15 and more than triple what it was when the local state of emergency was lifted last spring.

Testing remains very low by historical levels. That would tend to call into question the accuracy of test positivity rates, which had been declining before leveling off in the past month. However, the fact that test positivity has continued to rise even while the number of tests has remained static would seem to confirm a growing number of daily infections.

Public Health reported that “Los Angeles County is in the Low Hospital Admission Level with 3.4 weekly COVID-19 hospital admissions per 100,000 people, reported on August 7 for the seven-day period ending July 29.” But there has been a steady rise over the past two weeks. See the chart below.

The average number of deaths related to Covid across Los Angeles remains very low, at 1.7 per day as of the week ending July 24.

One wild card is the resumption of classes for fall at LAUSD campuses yesterday. Per Public Health, “Last August and September, TK-12 schools reported more than 1,100 COVID-19 clusters, groups of potentially connected cases, over an eight-week period.” This year the region is starting at a much, much lower level of infection, which should help prevent that kind of wave.

On the flip side, a new variant that seems to be more transmissible has become dominant in the U.S.

“This week, the World Health Organization named EG.5 as a variant of interest,” reads a WHO “Initial Risk Evaluation” dated August 9. “The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Nowcast modeling projects that for the week ending Aug. 5, EG.5 accounted for the largest proportion of COVID infections in the United States.”

That CDC modeling puts EG.5 at 17.3% and growing as of August 5. That same modeling has EG.5 at 16.2% and growing across CA, NV and AZ as of that same date, putting it just behind variant XBB.1.1.6 at 18.6%. It’s worth noting that the proportion of XBB.1.1.6 is falling in the region, according to CDC projections.

EG.5 is not currently considered more virulent than other variants. WHO indicates the risk of the variant having an increased growth advantage over others is moderate.

“The variant is the fastest growing variant in several WHO regions as well as rapidly increasing in prevalence,” read the WHO risk evaluation. “If the estimated growth rates are sustained, this variant may become the dominant variant in more countries and even globally over time.”

Confidence in that assertion is high, according to the WHO, “as the growth advantage has been estimated by several groups of experts and in several countries and WHO regions.”

Best of Deadline

Sign up for Deadline's Newsletter. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Click here to read the full article.