Barber shops, salons can also open at reduced capacity
By Sam Catanzaro
Los Angeles County is slowly reopening as schools will be to allowed offer in-school services for small cohorts of students while hair salons and barbershops can now operate at limited capacity.
On Thursday, September 2, the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health (Public Health), in consultation with the Board of Supervisors, revised regulations to allow for limited, on-campus operation for schools in L.A. County, as well as limited in-door operations of hair salons and barbershops.
Beginning Monday, September 14, schools K-12 may offer in-school services for small cohorts of students with Individualized Education Plans (IEP), students requiring instruction for English as a Second Language (ESL) or students needing assessments or specialized in-school services, as long as the school is able to fully implement the County Health Officer’s re-opening protocols.
Public Health will not, however, be opening the waiver program for instruction of students in grades TK-6 as the department monitors the implementation of this effort to safely get students needing specialized in-school services back to school.
Under the order, hair salons and barbershops are now able re-open for indoor services at 25 percent occupancy provided they are in full compliance with the Health Officer’s protocols.
The order “encourages” these businesses to continue outdoor operations when possible, and to offer in-door operations for those services that cannot be provided outdoors, according to the County.
All other current restrictions remain unchanged at this time.
“Right now, a cautious and titrated reopening – with close monitoring of what happens to our data in the weeks to follow – is needed to ensure we are not experiencing significant spikes in cases, hospitalizations and deaths, as we saw in July after re-openings and holidays. As we slowly reopen sectors, we will watch closely how it is impacting community transmission. The longer our county’s 7-day average case rate remains above 7, as determined by the State, the longer we will remain in the State’s most restrictive Tier. In addition, once both our 7-day average case rate and 7-day average positivity percentage meet the criteria for Tier 2, they must stay there for at least two weeks before we can be moved to the next less restrictive Tier,” said Barbara Ferrer Director of Public Health.
On Wednesday, Public Health confirmed 51 new deaths and 1,457 new cases of confirmed COVID-19. This brings the cumulative number of positive cases of COVID-19 across all areas of L.A. County to 243,935, and a total of 5,878 deaths. In Santa Monica there have been 789 cases and 40 deaths. As of Wednesday, there are 1,048 hospitalized, of which 31% are confirmed cases in the ICU. Upon further investigation, 43 cases and two deaths reported earlier were not L.A. County residents.
92 percent of the people who died from COVID-19 had underlying health conditions, according to Public Health.
Testing results are available for 2,317,851 individuals with 10% of all people testing positive as of Wednesday.
