LOS ANGELES — Los Angeles County will end its COVID-19 emergency declaration at the end of March — the latest region to take that step amid stabilizing and improving pandemic conditions.
The move, approved unanimously Tuesday by the county Board of Supervisors, comes the same day Gov. Gavin Newsom formally rescinded the three-year-old statewide emergency declaration.
Like their state counterparts, L.A. County officials praised the original March 2020 proclamation of a local health emergency pertaining to COVID-19 for providing necessary authority and flexibility to respond to the outbreak.
But given current conditions — where vaccines and therapeutics are plentiful and hospitalization and death rates have tumbled without the sort of aggressive interventions seen earlier in the COVID-19 era — officials said such measures are no longer necessary.
“COVID is still with us, but it is no longer an emergency. And it’s time for us in L.A. County to end our emergency orders,” Supervisor Janice Hahn said Tuesday.
According to the motion to terminate the local declaration, which Hahn co-authored with Supervisor Kathryn Barger, “Every county department has relied on the existence of these emergency orders and health officer orders in various ways to protect against COVID-19 and provide essential services to protect the public over the past several years. It is beyond dispute that these actions saved lives and protected the health of county residents.”
But, the motion continued, “Over the last three years, the county has developed the tools to continue to mitigate the impacts of COVID-19 without exclusively relying on the use of the extraordinary powers afforded by the various emergency proclamations and declarations.”
Under the board-approved motion, the county’s local emergency declaration will end March 31.
“These past few years, and especially that first year before we had the vaccines, were the darkest years many of us have lived through,” Hahn said. “And I really want to take this opportunity to thank everyone in L.A. County who helped us get through to the other side.”
The city of Los Angeles ended its own local COVID-19 emergency declaration on Feb. 1. President Joe Biden has also informed Congress he will rescind the national-level emergency and public health emergency declarations on May 11.
L.A. County, far and away the most populous in the nation, has also been among the hardest-hit parts of California throughout the pandemic. According to data compiled by the Los Angeles Times, L.A. has recorded the third-highest per capita cumulative case rate and fifth-highest death rate out of California’s 58 counties.
Officials have said a number of factors made L.A. County particularly vulnerable to COVID-19 — including the region’s poverty rate, overcrowded housing, preexisting health conditions among residents and its high population of front-line workers who were at greater risk of on-the-job coronavirus exposure.
Such characteristics have often been cited by county health officials as rationale for moving faster and further than its Southern California neighbors in terms of implementing measures aimed at tamping down transmission.
L.A. County was the first in California to reinstate an indoor mask mandate in July 2021 in response to the Delta surge, and publicly contemplated reinstituting that order the following summer and autumn during spikes fueled by the super-contagious family of Omicron subvariants.
Like the rest of the state, L.A. County has seen steady improvement in many of its pandemic metrics since the winter holiday season.
For the seven-day period that ended Tuesday, L.A. County was reporting about 76 cases a week for every 100,000 residents.
That’s significantly lower than the most recent seasonal high of 272 cases a week for every 100,000 residents, set the week ending Dec. 7.
It’s also close to the autumn lull of 60 cases a week for every 100,000 residents, but still higher than last spring’s low of 42 cases a week for every 100,000 residents.
A case rate of 100 or more is considered high. The pandemic record was 2,890 cases a week for every 100,000 residents, set for the week that ended Jan. 15, 2022, during the first omicron surge.
As of Monday, 648 coronavirus-positive individuals were hospitalized countywide — about half as many as the most recent seasonal peak of 1,308, set on Dec. 8. It’s also far less than the prior winter surges of 4,814 on Jan. 19, 2022; and 8,098, set on Jan. 5, 2021.
L.A. County is recording 90 COVID-19 deaths a week for the seven-day period that ended Tuesday. That’s lower than the winter peak of 164 deaths for the week that ended Jan. 13.
County Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer has said a more stable death rate would be about 35 COVID-19 deaths a week. Such a number might still be difficult to accept — especially since fatalities are now largely preventable with vaccines and antiviral treatments — but would nonetheless represent stability and “indicate that our protections are really working extraordinarily well.”
By comparison, the all-time peak of COVID-19 deaths was 1,690 for the week that ended Jan. 14, 2021. The following winter, the peak was 513 deaths for the week that ended Feb. 9, 2022.
Countywide, 81% of L.A. County residents have received at least one dose of COVID-19 vaccine, and 73% have at least completed their primary series. Roughly 17.5% of county residents ages 5 and up have received an updated bivalent booster.
On Wednesday, the county will permanently shutter the standing vaccination sites at the Balboa Sports Complex, Commerce Senior Citizens Center and Norwalk Arts & Sports Complex, according to the Department of Public Health. Locations and hours of other vaccination providers are available at vaccinatelacounty.com.
COVID-19 is expected to remain a significant cause of death for some time to come, especially among people who aren’t up to date on their vaccination and booster shots, and aren’t given anti-COVID drugs like Paxlovid when they do get infected.
About 60,000 U.S. residents have died from COVID-19 since October, a sum that’s more than triple the 18,000 estimated U.S. flu deaths over the same time period.
Another concern is long COVID — an array of symptoms that can persist for months or years after an acute coronavirus infection that is expected to result in a significant cause of disability in the U.S. for some time to come. A federal estimate, based on survey data, suggests 28% of people who have had COVID-19 have experienced long COVID.
Most people with long COVID experience improvements in symptoms over a long period of time, Ferrer said, but some people experience long COVID as a disability that has persisted for years and has not ended.
“It’s sobering to see how so many people are still affected by long COVID nearly three years into the pandemic,” she said.
