Covid-19 Rates in Los Angeles Have Gone From Worst to Among the Best
Theories on why infections, deaths and hospitalizations have plummeted include high immunity from past spikes and a less infectious variant
Los Angeles County, home of the Santa Monica Pier, now has one of the lowest rates of infection per capita of the nation’s 10 most populous counties.
LOS ANGELES—At the start of the year here, hospitals were full, restaurants were empty, and three times more Covid-19 cases were being reported every day than in any other U.S. county.
Now Los Angeles County has one of the lowest rates of infection per capita of the nation’s 10 most populous counties. Restaurants are packed, hospitals have open beds, and researchers are studying possible reasons for one of the pandemic’s biggest turnarounds, which has occurred despite vaccination rates lower than the national average. Their theories include high immunity caused by previous spikes and a common variant in California that may be keeping out more infectious strains.
As case rates have fallen across the country in recent months, California has led the way. It now has the lowest per capita Covid infection rate in the continental U.S., according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, thanks in large part to Los Angeles County, where a quarter of the state’s 40 million people live.
About 20% of Covid tests were coming back positive in Los Angeles County in early January, with more than 15,000 new cases and 250 deaths reported most weekdays and more than 1,600 intensive care beds taken by coronavirus patients. In the past week, the positivity rate has been hovering around or below 1%. There are around 400 new cases and fewer than 50 deaths reported most days and just under 500 people are currently hospitalized with Covid-19.
“It’s a dramatic decrease,” said Barbara Ferrer, Los Angeles County’s director of public health. She said it would take months before there were definitive answers about why the Covid rates have come down so sharply, but several factors are likely at play.
Over the course of the pandemic, Los Angeles County has confirmed 1.18 million Covid-19 cases. But close to 40% of the population may have actually been infected already, said Shira Shafir, an associate professor of epidemiology at the University of California, Los Angeles. That isn’t high enough for herd immunity, but may have left a large chunk of population not susceptible to the virus.
In addition, a California variant, which emerged late last year as a cause for rising infections here, may be keeping out the more dangerous U.K. variant that has driven rising infection rates in the Midwest, according to health researchers. The California variant is 20% more transmissible than the original strain of Covd-19, while the U.K. variant, is about 50% more transmissible, according to the CDC.
Vaccinations are spreading fast but lag the national average. Just over 37% of Los Angeles County residents 16 or older received at least one dose as of April 9. According to the latest data from the CDC, 51.5% of all American adults have received at least one dose
“You have fewer susceptible people, more people getting vaccinated, and we’re still holding steady on our safety requirements,” Dr. Ferrer said.
Unlike states that reopened their economies entirely last month, such as Texas and Arizona, California has been slow to relax regulations. And Los Angeles officials have chosen to keep some in place even when state rules allowed them to scale back.
Restaurants were closed, even for outdoor dining, for more than two months over the winter, along with schools, gyms, museums and movie theaters. Those measures helped the county to get where it is today, Dr. Ferrer said.
In the past few weeks, Los Angeles has been one of the last major metro areas in the country to begin reopening. Public school students are returning to classrooms part-time, while restaurants, gyms and museums are welcoming limited numbers of people. In trendy neighborhoods like Echo Park, would-be diners are crowding sidewalks, waiting for an available table.
“Every day, I had to check the numbers to see if I could cover payroll or not,” Armando De La Torre, 61, who owns a small chain of taco restaurants in Los Angeles called Guisados, said of the situation a few months ago. “Now things are getting better every week.”
Hospitals—which in January were so overrun with Covid patients that hallways, waiting rooms and doorways were used to treat patients—now have more than 1,000 available beds.
But health researchers and local officials said the threat of another surge in cases will persist until at least 70% of the population is vaccinated or have some form of immunity.
“I think for right now, until we get more of the population vaccinated and approach more towards herd immunity, we always have a certain level of risk of outbreak and additional surges,” said Johnese Spisso, chief executive of the UCLA Hospital System.
Dr. Ferrer said she remained particularly concerned about low vaccination rates among Black and Latino men, 19% and 17% of whom have received at least one shot, respectively. They have also been among the groups hardest hit by Covid-19.
The public health director said she works at least once a week at a county vaccination site and often encounters people who don’t think they need to be vaccinated, either because they already had the virus or don’t believe they will get it.
“We’re not going to have herd immunity until June,” she said. “But as more people get vaccinated, we’ll be in a better position to hold our own against the virus.”
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