The director of Public Health, Dr. Barbara Ferrer, said that if the decline continues, the county could reopen elementary schools for limited face-to-face instruction in a matter of weeks.
He said for the reopening of schools for kindergarten students through sixth grade transition, the county should have an average daily new case rate of 25 per 100,000 residents, a threshold set by the state. The current county rate is 48 per 100,000.
“I think it will take us two to three weeks to reduce that rate, and that means everyone is still doing their best, they follow the rules to make sure the transmission is reduced and not reversed,” Ferrer said.
“And the state, along with this rate of cases, there are many requirements that schools must be able to meet if they reopen while we are in the purple sector,” he added.
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Ferrer added that the next three or four weeks will be crucial for the reopening of schools and that the county must do “all right” to achieve this.
Eyewitness News turned to comment to the union representing teachers in the Los Angeles Unified School District, United Teachers Los Angeles, but has received no news.
Ferrer’s comment comes when U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said that with the right mitigation measures, there is a path to low-risk in-person learning.
LAUSD officials are stepping back from the guide. Some local teachers and LAUSD superintendent Austin Beutner don’t feel comfortable re-learning in person just from the CDC report.
Beutner said that in addition to safety precautions, teachers and staff need to be vaccinated before returning to the classroom.
Vaccination efforts continue to affect road bumps, but California is improving its implementation. After ranking nearly dead as the last place in the nation last week as a percentage of the population that received a shot, California now ranks 38th, with approximately 7% of the population receiving at least one dose.
They are more than 2.7 million doses so far, most of the country. About 58% of the doses sent to our state have been distributed.
While hospitalizations in Los Angeles County are still high, they are declining. Ferrer warned that deaths from COVID-19 are still rising and that the county still has a long way to go.
City News Service contributed to this report.
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