Director of Public Health, Dr. Barbara Ferrer, said that if the decline continues, the county could reopen primary schools for limited face-to-face instruction in a matter of weeks.
She said that for schools to reopen for kindergarten students transitioning to sixth grade, the county needs to have an average rate of new daily cases of 25 per 100,000 residents – a limit set by the state. The county’s current rate is 48 per 100,000.
“I believe it will take us two to three weeks to reduce that rate, and that means that everyone continues to do their best, following the rules to ensure that the transmission goes down and does not come back,” said Ferrer.
“And the state, along with the case rate, there are a number of requirements that schools need to meet if they are to reopen while we are in the purple sector,” she added.
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Ferrer added that the next three to four weeks will be crucial for the reopening of schools and that the county must do “everything right” for that.
Eyewitness News reached out to comment on the union representing teachers in the Los Angeles Unified School District, United Teachers Los Angeles, but got no response.
Ferrer’s comment comes at a time when the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention states that with the right mitigation measures, there is a path to low-risk personal learning.
LAUSD officials are rejecting the guidance. Some local teachers and LAUSD superintendent Austin Beutner are not comfortable returning to personal learning based only on the CDC report.
Beutner said that, in addition to safety precautions, teachers and staff need to be vaccinated before returning to the classroom.
Vaccination efforts are still hitting obstacles, but California is improving its implementation. After ranking last in the country last week as a percentage of the population receiving an injection, California is now in 38th place, with about 7% of the population receiving at least one dose.
There are more than 2.7 million doses so far, the largest amount in the country. Almost 58% of the doses sent to our state have already been distributed.
Although hospitalizations in LA County are still high, they are decreasing. Ferrer warned that deaths from COVID-19 are still increasing and that the county still has a long way to go.
The City News Service contributed to this report.
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