Los Angeles County health officials on Thursday reported a sharp increase in the spread of the coronavirus at workplaces as the region enters what officials have called an “alarming and dangerous phase” of the pandemic.
While the county is seeing outbreaks at a variety of workplaces, the sectors with the highest numbers are food processing and distribution facilities and manufacturing worksites. Often the locations are not enforcing physical distancing among employees or implementing infection control procedures, including the proper use of face coverings and frequent sanitation, Los Angeles County Health Officer Muntu Davis said.
“We’re not seeing the compliance that we need with the public health directives being in place to keep people’s health and livelihoods safe,” he said. “Our paramount concern is the safety of workers and their families.”
County inspectors have responded to 2,000 to 3,000 workplace complaints a month for the past several months. So far, the county has completed 52 outbreak investigations at restaurants, 47 at grocery stores and 23 at wholesale food manufacturing sites.
At restaurants, inspectors have discovered a lack of physical distancing in kitchens, employees not wearing face coverings properly, infrequent sanitation and business owners who are unaware of requirements to quarantine employees who are close contacts with a person who has tested positive for COVID-19.
Last week, a coronavirus outbreak struck Los Angeles Apparel, a garment manufacturer based in South L.A. More than 300 of the company’s nearly 2,300 employees have tested positive for COVID-19 and four have died, Davis said Thursday.
The Los Angeles County Department of Public Health said that it first shut down operations at the garment manufacturer June 27 after inspectors found “flagrant violations” of public health infection control orders and said the company failed to cooperate with an investigation of a reported coronavirus outbreak. The company’s founder, Dov Charney, refuted those claims.
“We rely on the many, many people who make our goods, ship those goods and make and prepare our food among other critical functions,” Davis said. “Those folks need to be safe and healthy at work. Business owners and operators need to adhere to the mandatory health officer orders so that our schools can reopen and we can get more people back to making a living.”
News of the increased spread at workplaces comes as the number of patients hospitalized in the county with confirmed coronavirus infections reached new heights this week.
On Monday, 2,193 patients were in hospitals with confirmed coronavirus infections — a single-day record for the county. The number dipped slightly Tuesday, to 2,173, before rebounding back to Monday’s high on Wednesday, county data show.
Hospitalizations, which had been declining since early May, began ticking up in mid-June and have continued their rise in July. Records show that hospitalizations of patients with confirmed coronavirus infections have jumped roughly 31% over the past three weeks.
“The shift from declining rates to increasing rates happened very rapidly, and we now see a three-day average of over 2,000 people hospitalized on a given day, which is more people hospitalized each day for COVID-19 than at any other point during the pandemic,” Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer said Wednesday.
Younger people, between the ages of 18 and 40, are also being hospitalized at a significantly higher rate than in previous weeks, data show.
“What this really means for us is we need to start and continue to take the steps that protect our healthcare infrastructure so that hospitals are able to manage the growing number of people that need inpatient care,” Ferrer said. “That is why it is so important to follow the public health directives like staying home, avoiding close contact with people who you don’t live with and wearing your face covering at all times when you’re out of your house.”
Statewide, more than 6,700 patients who’ve tested positive for COVID-19 are hospitalized, according to the latest numbers. That, too, is a new high.
It also mirrors trends in other counties across Southern California, including Orange, San Bernardino and Riverside counties.
Health officials in Orange County reported that 722 patients with confirmed cases of COVID-19 were hospitalized as of Tuesday, a new daily record for the county. Data showed that as of last week, the number of patients in hospitals had jumped 97% over three weeks, an indicator that health experts say shows the virus is spreading more rapidly in the region.
The spike has prompted hospitals countywide to begin to prepare for a surge of sick patients, according to Orange County Health Care Agency Director Dr. Clayton Chau.
“These trends are very concerning, and we can expect the impact on our healthcare system to get worse in the coming days and weeks,” Chau said last week. “If the surge goes up to — or beyond — their capacity to mobilize resources, that will cause a real strain. A strain on the hospital systems means a strain on the ability to care for all patients, both COVID-19 and non-COVID-19 folks.”
Earlier this month, L.A. County officials projected the possibility of running out of hospital beds in two to three weeks, with the number of ICU beds possibly being exhausted sometime in July.
“If the trajectory continues, the number of ICU beds — our most limited resource — is likely to become inadequate in the near future,” officials wrote in a memo issued July 4 by the L.A. County Department of Public Health to healthcare providers.
While the mortality rate is currently stable in Los Angeles County, the increase in hospitalizations will probably result in increased deaths in the coming days and weeks, Ferrer said.
Experts say deaths are a lagging indicator of coronavirus spread and probably reflect exposures to the virus that occurred four or five weeks earlier. L.A. County officials announced 44 new fatalities Wednesday — pushing the total death toll past 3,900 — as well as 2,758 new cases, boosting the cumulative count to more than 143,000.
Times staff writer Luke Money contributed to this report.
