Government officials in California, a recent epicenter of the U.S. pandemic, lifted local residences for all five regions Monday, amid expectations that ICU bed capacity would reach a major threshold within four weeks.
The trend is also moving in a positive direction in Los Angeles County, which has reduced its number of daily positive cases by more than half since it peaked earlier in January, said the province’s director of public health, Barbara Ferrer, said.
But she warned that coronavirus variants pose an increasing threat.
“They will become domineering and make it easier for people to become infected and lead to a boom,” Ferrer said as he urged residents to remain vigilant.
“This is not the time to think just because we’re reopening that things look rosy,” she said, adding that asymptomatic spread is a problem. “We do have to move through the next few weeks with caution. At many other points where we have reopened our sectors, we have actually seen a push,” Ferrer said.
The lifting of the order means a return to the four-story reopening system, and Los Angeles County will lift restrictions on the dining room outside and a local nightclub for non-essential workers on Friday, Ferrer said. But the reopening will require security adjustments, and Ferrer said she plans to meet with restaurant workers and unions Wednesday to discuss the changes.
Some elected officials have questioned the timing of the lifting of restrictions in the state, but dr. California Health and Services Minister Mark Ghaly said Tuesday that he believes it was lifted at the right time.
“It was not a local home order based solely on community transfer rates, it was really focused on what we would see in the hospitals for a few weeks,” said Dr. Ghaly explains.
Limited vaccines and a slow rollout
Another cause for concern is the limited amount of vaccines, Ferrer said.
Los Angeles County receives more than 168,000 doses of the vaccine weekly, but it is slowing down the number of people – more than 2 million people – currently eligible to be vaccinated, she said.
“Patience will be needed because we just do not have enough doses,” she said. “We are currently really limited with supply. This is a problem at the federal level. The government has promised to be more transparent, but also to increase production quickly so that we can get more in this country the province.”
The unpredictability of doses each week makes it difficult to open the vaccine appointments for more than a week at a time, Ferrer said. The next two weeks will be ‘rocky’, she said.
The supply is limited across the country, but the California Department of Public Health announced Tuesday that a new system will be put in place to respond to criticism over the slow and inefficient distribution of doses.
From next month, all Californians in Phase 1B Level 1 can make an appointment to receive the vaccine according to a standard-wide standard system. These people include health care workers, residents over the age of 65, education and child care, emergency services and food and agricultural workers.
Instead of provinces and hospitals managing their own vaccination systems, the state will now use a third-party administrator who will allocate vaccines directly to providers to maximize distribution efficiency.
“We have learned that in order to accelerate the pace, we need to scale up the scope of our efforts to ensure the provision of vaccines as quickly as it arrives in the state,” Governor Gavin Newsom said in a statement.
CNN’s Stella Chan and Sarah Moon contributed to this report.