The mayor addresses questions about reopening in an interview earlier today.
It’s been over a month since the “Safer at Home” order went into effect and there has been growing pressure from residents for the city to open up. While some counties have begun to ease up on restrictions, L.A. County has seen a rise in deaths. Today, 29 more deaths related to the coronavirus were reported, which is a jump from the 18 reported on Sunday.
In a radio interview on AirTalk today, Mayor Eric Garcetti discussed how he foresees the city moving forward in light of this. He said that he foresees “baby steps” toward reopening the city “in the next two to six weeks.” But cautioned that as by opening up in “the wrong way we could have, by August 1, 95% of us with COVID-19,” causing tens and thousands of deaths.
He stressed that opening up the right way would require having the proper infrastructure in place that could handle it. This would include “scaling, testing, safeguarding Angelenos — and still continuing to stay at home, probably for the majority of things that we do, and for the majority of workers.”
Thus his focus is less about having a concrete timeline and rather about monitoring the situation—and having the available testing to do so. In theory, as the numbers decrease smalls steps would be taken forward and the situation would need to be dressed before taking another step forward.
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