Los Angeles Mayor: ‘Countywide Emergency Order,’ New Restrictions And Closures Being Considered As L.A. Becomes Ground Zero Of The Covid-19 Pandemic – Deadline

Los Angeles is now the epicenter of the Covid-19 pandemic. It is the most infected county of the most infected state in the most infected country in the world.

In the pandemic’s spring wave, New York held that distinction — and it still is the state to have seen the largest single daily number of deaths. But given that the tally of daily cases and hospitalizations continue to skyrocket in L.A. and the fact that ICU availability was 0% in Southern California on Thursday, Los Angeles is unfortunately catching up.

On Thursday, another 14,418 Covid-19 infections were confirmed in L.A. County. The new cases lifted the countywide cumulative total to 581,519. In a county of 10 million people, that means 1 in 20 residents has had the virus.

COVID-19 Daily Update:
December 17, 2020
New Cases: 14,418 (580,325 to date)
New Deaths: 102 (8,664 to date)
Current Hospitalizations: 4,864 pic.twitter.com/HL1loxYbT2

— LA Public Health (@lapublichealth) December 18, 2020

Even more shocking, Los Angeles County is now seeing more daily cases than entire countries, including onetime hotspots such as Spain, Mexico, Poland and Portugal.

L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti revealed Thursday evening that city testing results were “seeing a 7-day positivity rate of an alarming 19.6%. Some of our sites have a positivity rate as high as 30%,” he said. For L.A. County, the 7-date rate was 13.7%.”

For comparison, at the very beginning of the
Source…