Last week, Los Angeles County started using a new infections reporting process that resulted in the numbers for last Thursday, Friday and Saturday being reported as one lump sum. It was a very scary lump sum, over 7,200 new cases. They did point out that we had a new all-time one day high of 3,187 cases on Friday alone. The County is currently testing over 15,000 people a day. Most of the infected people were instructed to self-quarantine. A vast majority of the new cases are people between 20 and 45, an age group that has had very few deaths.
Hospitalizations in the County have jumped 41% over the last 3 weeks. The total number of confirmed COVID-19 cases hospitalized as of Saturday July the 4thCounty wide is 1,921. Of that number 28% (538) are in the ICU. There are about 340 people on ventilators in LA County at this writing. I have not been able to find a number that shows how many of the “new” cases are in the ICU or on ventilators but LA County’s numbers say there has been no change in the number of people on Ventilators in the last few days and we still have over 2700 available.
On a brighter note, Malibu has been pretty steady with a total of 54 positive cases. The Medical profession has adopted all the new information about how to treat COVID-19 with great results. The “7 day average of daily deaths” numbers keeps declining with Los Angeles County approaching 50 and the State of California approaching 80. Malibu local Kal Klatte’s most recent chart of the 7 day average number of deaths, which had a spike last week, has dropped back to the previous trend line. It looks like we are back on track to have the nationwide 7 day average, hit 50 per day in another month or so. Nationwide the last two days fell to just over 250 deaths each.
Malibu was relatively quiet over the 4th. Southern California in general was another story as illegal fireworks of all kinds were set off all over the County. I watched a story on the news Sunday with video of a Palm tree ignited by fireworks and shedding embers. As the Fire Department arrived and started fighting the fire, a block away there was a man shooting off a Roman candle very near another Palm. We cannot afford to shut down law enforcement.
More good news! In the last City Council meeting of June the Council voted to extend the deadline for free Fire Rebuild Fees. You now have until December 31, 2020 to apply to Planning and until the end of June 2021 to pull your owner occupied Fire Rebuild permits. At this writing 240 single Family residences have been approved by Planning and 116 of those have pulled Building permits. Another 12 units of Multi Family have also pulled permits and are under construction.
There was a ceremony last week to award the 5thCertificate of Occupancy for a Fire Rebuild. I know that we all hope there will be many more in the coming months.