LA County pulls out, cancels return to mask mandates as COVID hospitals drop, #LA #County #Backs #Cancels #Return #Mask #Mandates #COVID OLASMEDIA TV NEWSThis is what we have for you today:
Los Angeles County will not reimpose a mask mandate, as it had threatened, as the number of coronavirus cases began to fall and hospitalizations fell below the threshold of 10 cases per 100,000 residents, public health officials said Thursday.
As Breitbart News reported earlier in July, the province reached the threshold for “high” community levels of COVID-19, as defined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and began a two-week countdown to new mask mandates.
But local businesses protested loudly and city councils in El Segundo, Beverly Hills, Long Beach and Pasadena announced that they would not comply with an extension of the mask mandates by the province.
LA County Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer said in a briefing Thursday that the number of cases had declined for five days since July 23, and the number of hospital admissions was also declining. She said the decline in hospital admissions is expected to continue.
Ferrer said that given the delay in CDC data on local hospitalizations, which only runs until July 25, local officials decided to use local data, which was a day more recent. Those data pointed to a hospitalization rate of 9.7 per 100,000, she said.
“While we don’t yet know what CDC will post with their update today, including their most redacted hospitalization data, … when we use the LA County data, we go from high community level to medium community level,” she explained.
While the community’s designation would not officially be changed to “average,” she said, provincial officials were hopeful that hospitalization rates would stay below 10 per 100,000, and had decided not to impose “universal indoor masking.” .
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday nights from 7pm to 10pm ET (4pm to 7pm PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 US Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential election from a conservative perspective. He is winner of the Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship 2018. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.