The number of new daily cases for Covid-19 in Los Angeles County had been dropping for two weeks. From a historical record of 21,411 on December 16, new cases were resolved between 13,000 and 15,000. Although the deaths remained extremely high, there was some hope that a plateau in the cases would mean that the transmission of the virus had slowed. Friday’s data could destroy that hope.
The LA County Department of Public Health reported 20,414 new infections reported on Friday. That was a huge leap, more than 5,000 cases above Thursday’s daily count of 15,129.
Friday’s peak could be related to a Spectrum Internet crash last week. County health officials noted that part of the recent increase in deaths was due to an “accumulation associated with the interruption of Spectrum and delays in holiday reporting.” Authorities in their Friday statement indicated that the outage was again affecting the data. But only a greater number of deaths were attributed to the interruption, not the radically higher number of new cases.
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The jump could also be the first indication of the dreaded Christmas wave, after many Angelenos got together and traveled to the parties. If that’s the case and this is just the beginning, LA will have a horrible January. Another frightening possibility is that the new, much more infectious variant of the virus, discovered in San Diego on Wednesday, is on the loose in Los Angeles. The numbers for the next few days will tell the story.
Meanwhile, the count of new daily deaths related to the virus remains very high. LA County reported 200 lives lost in the pandemic on Friday. Even though 15% is the delay, the remaining fatalities are still equal to the number of new deaths from all causes that the county suffers on a normal day.
This is after three consecutive days of recording lost lives for Covid-19. The count on Thursday was another 290 fatalities, although some of them were again due to a backlog of reports on the Internet outage and the holiday weekend.
The county set a new record for pandemic-related hospitalizations on Friday, with 7,613 affected patients at LA facilities. There are 200 more patients than Thursday. According to LA County Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer, more than half of hospitalized patients in the region had Covid-19. She said that two-thirds of people in need of care in the ICU are infected.