County Promotes Sensible Strategies to Reduce Dangers Associated with COVID-19

With the lifting of county, state and federal COVID-19 emergency orders, the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health or Public Health continues to ensure easy access to free vaccines, boosters, tests and therapeutics. With changes in federal and state guidance, Los Angeles County urges residents to maintain sensible precautions to minimize disruptions at worksites, schools and health care facilities caused by COVID-19 outbreaks.

Most worksites across the county (including schools) must adhere to the California Division of Occupational Safety and Health or CAL/OSHA requirements which state employers must:

• Ensure employees that test positive are not at the worksite for at least five days. Employees can return to work between days six through 10 after testing positive if they have not had a fever for a 24-hour period without using fever-reducing medication and other symptoms are resolved or improving. They must wear a mask around others for a total of 10 days after testing positive for COVID-19.
• Identify and notify employees who were exposed to someone with COVID-19 during the virus’s infectious period.
• Make testing available to all employees at no cost who had close contact with an infected person at the workplace.
• Ensure all employees who had close contact with a known COVID-19 case, and remain at work, take a COVID-19 test within 3-5 days after the close contact in the event of an outbreak.

All worksites are required to report to the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health clusters of three or more cases over 14 days; this allows Public Health to assist worksites to reduce additional transmission that can lead to significant disruptions and possible severe illness. Case clusters can be reported to Public Health at 1-888-397-3993.

Beginning in April, in alignment with both the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention or CDC and the California Department of Public Health or CDPH, Public Health will change to weekly reporting of COVID-19 case, hospitalization and death data on Thursdays. The last day of daily reporting will be Tuesday, March 28.

The 7-day average case count for COVID-19 dropped nearly 18% from the week prior from 726 last week to an average of 593 this week. Reported average daily deaths remained stable at about 12 deaths reported per day. The seven-day average of new COVID-19 positive hospital admissions is 68 this week, down from 76 last week. The seven-day average for test positivity remained stable at about 4%.

Los Angeles County remains in the CDC’s Low COVID-19 Community Level for the 10th consecutive week. As of March 24 the total number of deaths in L.A. County is 35,970. There are 413 people with COVID-19 currently hospitalized.

A wide range of data and dashboards on COVID-19 from the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health are available on the Public Health website at http://www.publichealth.lacounty.gov