Los Angeles ordersmore restrictions but stops short of full shutdown
LOS ANGELES— Los Angeles County announced a new stay-home order Friday as coronavirus cases surged out of control in the nation’s most populous county, banning most gatherings but stopping short of a full shutdown on retail stores and other nonessential businesses.
The three-week “safer at home” order takes effectMonday. It came as the county of 10 million residents confirmed 24 new deaths and 4,544 new confirmed cases of COVID-19.
The county had set a threshold for issuing the stay-home order: an average of 4,500 cases a day over a five-day period, but hadn’t expected to reach that level until next month. However, the five-day average of new cases reported Friday was 4,751.
Experts: Virus numbers could be erratic after Thanksgiving
The coronavirus testing numbers that have guided much of the nation’s response to the pandemic are likely to be erratic over the next week or so, experts said Friday, as fewer people get tested during the Thanksgiving holiday weekend and testing sites observe shorter hours.
The result could be potential dips in reported infections that offer the illusion that the spread of the virus is easingwhen, in fact, the numbers say little aboutwhere the nation stands in fighting COVID-19. The number of Americanswho have tested positive passed 13million Friday, according to Johns Hopkins University.
“I just hope that people don’t misinterpret the numbers and think that there wasn’t a major surge as a result of Thanksgiving, and then end up making Christmas and Hanukkah and other travel plans,” said Dr. LeanaWen, a professor at GeorgeWashington University and an emergency physician.
A similar pattern unfolds on many weekends. Because some testing centers, labs and state offices are closed on Saturdays and Sundays, COVID case numbers often drop each Sunday andMonday, only to peak on Tuesday.
Dr. Mark Rupp, professor and chief of infectious diseases at the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha, said the effect of Thanksgiving is likely to be a
magnified version of the weekend figures. The Thursday holiday will exacerbate the record-keeping discrepancies over the long weekend, artificially depressing the reported numbers for four or five days before spiking as test results catch up.
Johns Hopkins University reported a high ofmore than 2million
tests a few days before Thanksgiving as people prepared to travel, but that number had dropped to less than 1.2 million tests on Thanksgiving Day.
Officials warned that the tests are often a snapshot, not a complete assurance that someone has not been exposed to the virus.
“I think it can be kind of a false sense of security for some people,” Rupp said, predicting that the holiday will be followed within weeks by another surge “because people have continued to travel, they’ve continued to have gatherings outside their immediate family.”