While COVID-19 cases continue to rise across Los Angeles, Santa Monica city services have remained relatively unscathed despite cases in several departments.
The town hall reported 69 cases from all departments in the past week, including six in the SMPD, 14 in the SMFD and 16 in the Ministry of Transport.
Officials said the city continues to follow all LA County’s Department of Public Health’s job prevention protocols, both on construction sites and when employees work with the public.
“This has not affected the city’s ability to provide safety and public services. At the start of the pandemic, the city’s essential services departments developed employee contingency plans to cope with employee absences from COVID-19, ”said Constance Farrell, Santa Monica Public Information Officer. “These plans were not activated during the current case escalation.”
According to Public Health, cases have risen to their highest level since the pandemic began, but vaccines continue to offer protection against serious illness. In addition, new rules have been introduced calling for more protective measures for workers in all industries.
“The spread of COVID-19 in the community and the high contagiousness of the Omicron variant have resulted in some city workers becoming ill,” Farrell said. Changes have been made to the city’s already strict infection control measures to proactively prevent the spread of COVID-19 in the workplace, such as:
In roughly the same period, more than 500 LAPD officers and other police officers, as well as nearly 300 firefighters, were out of service due to exposure to COVID.
Although the number of COVID hospital admissions has increased rapidly across the county, many of the hospitalized COVID-positive patients are seeking care because of a non-COVID health problem, according to county officials.
Data analyzed by Public Health showed that in early November, 75% of hospital patients who tested positive for COVID were hospitalized for medical issues related to the COVID diagnosis, and more than half of COVID positive hospital patients are in hospital because of a non-COVID-related illness. While any Covid patient could put stress on the system, the current surge suggests that there may be fewer COVID-positive patients in need of intensive care and ventilators than last winter.
Comments are closed.