“OR has been rising steadily for the past 3 weeks,” said Dr. Christina Ghaly, Director of the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services on Monday. This rate is the calculated Covid-19 transmission rate in the county.
County public health director Barbara Ferrer reported at a Zoom meeting with reporters that the estimated number of transmissions was 0.93 in early March, up from 0.87 the previous week. The uncertainty range is 0.085 to 1.04. Any R number above 1 means that each infected person is transmitting the virus to more than one resident in the county. In a region of 10 million, infections can quickly grow like a snowball.
According to a report from LA County released on Monday, the rate of reduction of patients in local hospitals has also started to decline. The report says that, due to the range of uncertainty in the R-number, it is currently unclear whether “the number of hospitalizations will continue to decrease, remain stable or increase”.
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For comparison, in early November, the R went from 0.95 to 1.02 in one week. We all know what happened next. But March 2021 is very different from November 2020.
While R is rising, Ghaly said that “the foundation on which R operates is incredibly important. The bottom base of cases in which we are operating now is extremely important. “
In fact, officials reported only 516 new cases and nine additional deaths on Monday, although these relatively low numbers may reflect delays in the weekend’s notification. In early November, the county was reporting about 1,800 new cases daily and 22 additional deaths. Therefore, the daily totals are much, much lower than where they were a month ago, which means that an increase in transmission would not have the same impact as it would have before.
“I think we will NEVER go back to the disaster we saw in the spring and early summer,” said the generally cautious Ferrer. “There are a large number of people [now] vaccinated. We are nowhere near collective immunity, ”she continued,“ but there is a lot of protection. In our qualified nursing facilities, we will not see an increase as we saw in June. ”Ferrer said the same applies to healthcare professionals, many of whom are now vaccinated.
Ferrer asked for caution, even when she announced a wider reopening for bars and breweries. She noted that Miami, which is having springtime crowds, has a 9% test positivity rate. The LA number, according to the county council, is 1.70%.
“When you see that, in a week, cases go up in places like Michigan … to 3,000 in a week,” Ferrer said he doesn’t want to see an increase like that in LA
Asked whether increased public activity or more infectious variants may be responsible for the data, Ghaly speculated that it is probably a combination of the two.
“Just based on time, it is not based on reopening,” she said. “This is simply not consistent. The model perceives the slowdown in the rate of hospitalizations. It may not be the variants and it may be the behavior, but more likely a combination of the two. “