For the past month, the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health has been noting signals that the COVID-19 case rate may no longer be declining locally. The steady decline observed since July appeared to plateau in mid-October. Last week, Public Health reported a nearly 10% increase in the 7-day-average number of cases from the prior week.
While Omicron BA.5 continues to be the dominant subvariant, each week it is accounting for a smaller proportion of samples. As of the week ending October 15, it accounted for about 72% of sequenced specimens. BF.7, a descendant of BA.5, makes up the second largest proportion of cases sequenced at 7.8%.
Recently, Public Health added two additional descendant strains of BA.5 to weekly variant reporting: BQ.1 and BQ.1.1. Each of these sublineages account for 3.4% of sequenced specimens for the week ending October 15.
However, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates that as of about three weeks ago, BQ.1 and BQ.1.1 combined, accounted for nearly 17% of cases across the country, up considerably from about 9% the week before. There are reports that BQ.1 and BQ.1.1 have some growth advantages over some of the other sublineages, and they may begin to increase here as well.
One thing that everyone can do to prepare is to make sure they have the updated COVID-19 Fall bivalent booster, which is now available for people 5 years and older. A bivalent booster can protect against both the original virus that causes COVID-19 and the more recently spreading Omicron BA.4 and BA.5 subvariants.
These two subvariants are different, but they have the same spike protein, and the new Fall bivalent booster offers protection against both. The bivalent booster is also expected to provide protection against the BQ strains.
Over the course of the pandemic, Culver City has had far more illness than death, most likely because of the high level of vaccinations, keeping symptoms at bay and warding off longer and more fatal infections.
Total Case and Death Counts as of November 9, 2022 show the number of cases in Culver City as 10,590, and the umber of deaths in Culver City as 144.
Cases in LA County; 1,662 new cases were reported today (3,500,252 cases to date) and 10 new deaths were reported today (34,032 deaths to date.)
There are 492 people with COVID-19 currently hospitalized in LA County. Testing results are available for more than 12,666,000 individuals with 24% of people testing positive. Today’s daily positivity rate is 5.9%. View additional COVID-19 metrics on the LA County COVID-19 Surveillance Dashboard and the COVID-19 Cases and Deaths by City/Community table.
