The County reported on what the State’s additional equity metric on their Blueprint for a Safer Economy means for LA County. Because most counties, including LA County, have significant differences in COVID-19 outcomes by race, ethnicity and socioeconomic status, the County notes that it is important to not only look at COVID-19 indicators across the entire county, but also to understand the experiences among different racial and ethnic groups and people who live in areas with unequal access to resources. For this reason, the State created a metric to assess each county’s progress in closing gaps between people living in communities with the fewest resources and those living in communities with significant resources.
While the County still has a significant gap between the positivity rate in high resourced communities as compared to less advantaged communities, this difference is not standing in the way of the County advancing to a less restrictive tier at this time. When compared to most of the other Southern CA counties, LA County has one of the lowest equity measures. What is standing in the way of advancing to a less restrictive tier, is that the new daily case rate averages over 700 new cases per day in LA County.
LA County is currently in Tier 1 with 7.4 new daily cases per 100,000 people. Although testing positivity rates would put the County in Tier 3, when metrics fall in different tiers, the State places counties in the most restrictive tier.
For more information about the State’s framework, visit the CA Department of Public Health’s website at http://publichealth.lacounty.gov/
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