Los Angeles County reported 274 new fatalities related to coronavirus, surpassing a total of 10,000 deaths, health officials confirmed in a news conference on Wednesday.
The county broke its previous record of 227 deaths on Tuesday.
“The terrible reality is that the average number of people dying each day from Covid-19 illness, as noted by Supervisor Solis, is about 150 people a day,” L.A. County Public Health Director Dr. Barbara Ferrer said.
Ferrer also noted that the high number is due to a backlog associated with an outage.
According to Ferrer, the number of people dying from the virus is as high as the average number of people dying each day from every other cause, which is about 170 people.
Mortuaries across the county are filling up and they are struggling to find space for Covid victims, Department of Health Services Director Dr. Christina Ghaly said.
More data: The daily positivity rate in the county is about 20% and over 7,000 people are hospitalized, Ferrer said.
While the new Covid-19 variant, first identified in the United Kingdom, has not been reported in Los Angeles County, she said, “this doesn’t mean the variant is not circulating in L.A. County.”
She explained that the variant was not found in the first set of samples that were tested.
To date, the county has a total of 756,116 coronavirus cases and 10,056 deaths.