Director of Public Health Dr. Barbara Ferrer said that if the decline continues, the county would be able to reopen elementary schools within weeks for limited personal instruction.
She said for schools reopening for students in transitional kindergarten through sixth grades, the county should have an average new daily rate of 25 per 100,000 residents – a threshold set by the state. The county’s current rate is 48 per 100,000.
“I think it will take us two to three weeks to bring that percentage down, and that presupposes that everyone continues to do their very best, sticking to the rules to make sure the broadcast goes down and not back up”, Ferrer said.
“And the state, along with that number of cases, there are a lot of requirements that schools must be able to meet if they reopen while we’re in the purple sector,” she added.
RELATED: LAUSD Pushes Back on CDC School Reopening Report
Ferrer added that the next three to four weeks will be critical to the reopening of schools, and that the province must do “everything right” to achieve this.
Eyewitness News contacted the union representing the teachers of the Los Angeles Unified School District, United Teachers Los Angeles, but has heard nothing.
Ferrer’s comment comes while the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said that with proper mitigation measures, there is a path to low-risk personal learning.
LAUSD officials are pushing back guidance. Some local teachers and LAUSD Superintendent Austin Beutner don’t feel comfortable returning to learning in person from just that CDC report.
Beutner has said that in addition to safety precautions, teachers and staff should be vaccinated before returning to class.
Vaccination efforts are still hitting bumps, but California is improving its rollout. After being ranked last in the country by percentage of the population receiving an injection last week, California is now ranked 38th, with about 7% of the population receiving at least one dose.
That’s more than 2.7 million doses to date, the most in the country. Almost 58% of the doses sent to our state have been distributed.
While hospital admissions are still high in LA County, they are declining. Ferrer warned that the death toll from COVID-19 is still on the rise, and the county still has a long way to go.
City News Service contributed to this report.
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