The coronavirus crisis in California could escalate to be as bad as the Big Apple’s outbreak, officials warned this week.
By Friday afternoon, a total of 4,533 COVID-19 cases and 91 deaths had been reported in the Golden State, The Los Angeles Times reported.
In Los Angeles County alone, cases surged to 1,481 Friday, with a total of 26 deaths, the paper reported.
Those numbers are still thousands fewer than the figures in New York, where 44,635 cases have been reported — 25,398 in the city alone.
But Barbara Ferrer, director of the LA County Department of Public Health, told the Times that the mortality rate in her county is about 1.8 percent — higher than that of New York City and the US as a whole.
However, LA has tested far fewer people than in the Big Apple, so the true number of people infected is far less clear, she said.
If each person who tested positive for the virus infected two others, “within a few weeks, there could be over a million people that would be infected in LA County,” Ferrer added.
LA Mayor Eric Garcetti had a similarly grim outlook.
“I was asked by a reporter today, ‘Is Los Angeles the next New York?'” he said Thursday, according to CNN. “And I said sure in the same way that New York is now the next Italy, and Italy was the next Iran and Iran was the next China, and no matter where you live, you are the next.”
In San Francisco, Mayor London Breed estimated the city would need at least 1,500 more ventilators and 5,000 more hospital beds to keep up with a multiplying patient count.
“It is plausible that despite all these efforts, we could have a scenario similar to the one that is playing out in New York this very day,” Breed said.