The Los Angeles County Department of Public Health created a COVID-19 Data Dashboard that includes daily updates, data trends and graphs, and explainers about what the data means. The department’s Director Dr. Barbara Ferrer said the numbers in the COVID-19 Data Dashboard are the same ones she sees every day.

“I think it's really important that everyone has the same information we have here at the department of public health. That information is not a secret. Everyone can understand it if we present it appropriately,” she said. “Everyone should know what information we are using to make those decisions.”

Ferrer hopes the COVID-19 Data Dashboard will give Angelenos the power to make their own decisions about what’s safe to do and what’s not.

“You will be able to look at what we call the positivity rate: When people get tested, what percent of the people getting tested are positive? And that’s important because if you see an increase in that number, then it means there's more community transmission,” Dr. Ferrer said. “There are more people who are transmitting it, and your chances of getting infected now have increased.”

Angelenos now have easily-accessible information about the status of COVID-19 in their communities.

“I want everyone to be able to see that information, to understand that information, to feel free to ask us questions about the information that they're seeing, and then that helps them be able to be as well-informed as I am about what's the trajectory for this pandemic and how we all need to come together as a community to save lives,” Dr. Ferrer said.

Part of keeping the community safe involves staying home. This provides a particular challenge for students who are eager to go back to school this fall.

“I know everyone really is anxious for children to be able to go back to their schools, and back to their friends, and back to their teachers, and have that very enriched learning environment,” Dr. Ferrer said. “And we're very supportive of doing all of the planning and all of the work that it’s going to take to make sure that we're creating a school environment that offers as much safety as possible.”

However, it might not be safe to go back to school in two months. Dr. Ferrer holds a call regularly with L.A. district principals, superintendents, and headmasters about reopening protocols, what should be in them, and what is feasible to accomplish in a school environment.

“We are getting ready to release those protocols about how to create an environment at school, physically at a school building, that offers as much safety as we think is possible,” Dr. Ferrer said. “But the caveat is that while we release those, and we want everyone to continue with planning for the reopening, the decision about when those school campuses should reopen is something that needs to be made with a lot of other people, including the state, including the Board of Supervisors, including districts, and superintendents.”

The Department of Public Health will provide the best advice it can about the conditions that need to be met in L.A. before schools are able to reopen. The state will make the final call.

“It's a big decision, and I want to really acknowledge that the state plays a significant role in those reopening dates,” Ferrer said. “Our job is to really help people understand that if there is a ton of community spread that is going on in a community, and you reopen a school, because the school is a microcosm of what's happening in the community, you may in fact very quickly see yourself in that school community experiencing the same thing that you’re experiencing in the larger community, which could be many outbreaks. That would force schools to close again.”

Research indicates that some children are experiencing COVID-19 in a different way than adults do. Pediatric Inflammatory Multisystem Syndrome (PIMS) and Kawasaki disease both have been linked to children who either tested positive for COVID-19 or had the antibodies.

Ferrer said the Department of Public Health will soon conduct a seroprevalence study among young children to see if they have COVID-19 antibodies.

“I think that will help us understand whether or not the young children who live in L.A. County have a similar rate of infectivity as adults, or were they in fact infected at a much lower rate or a much higher rate,” Ferrer said. “There haven’t been a lot of seroprevalence studies in our country yet on children, so I think this will start to give us some information about what do we know about what happened with children here over the last five months of this pandemic, and that ought to help us understand what may be possibilities around transmission.”

Ferrer stressed that children do transmit COVID-19 to others.

“I don't want anybody to walk away from this conversation and say, ‘Oh children don’t infect anybody else.’ That's absolutely not true,” she said.

Seven percent of all COVID-19 cases in L.A. County are from children under the age of 18, Dr. Ferrer said.

“Schools are not just made up of students and children. They’re made up of the many wonderful adults who care for them and teach them, and we also have to make sure that the environment is safe for the adults that are coming in,” she said. “And really these are super dedicated people. They care for our children every single day. Now that everyone has had an opportunity to be a teacher at home, I think everyone appreciates how difficult the job of really not just caring and loving our children and helping them thrive, but actually educating them.”

L.A. County began reopening its economy in May. Ferrer acknowledged that, looking back in time, that might have been too early.

“The decisions were made really based on how our information, our data was looking, when we had been very stable for a very long period of time, and also based on how much compliance we had with all of the requests we had made for safer at home,” she said. “So I don't think at the time we made a bad decision because we didn't pay attention to our information, we didn't really understand how people were going to behave because I think the information we had said, ‘Look, we've been really stable for a long period of time.’ We never really saw a huge spike after April, and people are really following the directives, and they are staying home, and all of our data indicated that people were prepared in fact to continue to do what they needed to do to play their part is slowing the spread.”

L.A. County reopened when people were eager to get outside, enjoy the sun, and resume some level or normalcy.

“I think it was also at a time where at the federal level, at the national level, you were hearing a lot more hype about how everything’s OK, and we’re getting back to normal,” Ferrer said. “And so I think it ends up being a confluence. It’s summer, it’s Memorial Day weekend. People want to get back with their families. When we start reopening, I think what we didn’t anticipate is that that might signal for people that things were actually OK.”

Reopening L.A.’s economy made people think that they could return to life as it was before the pandemic began.

“For other people, it’s very easy to say, ‘Look, we can go for hikes again, we can go to the beach, and we can go back to work. So we're pretty good here in L.A. County, things are OK, you know we can get back to normal,’” she said. “If I look back, that’s what we missed, is we really needed to emphasize: We're not going back to normal, not for a long time. What we are is creating a new normal, and the new normal is going to have its own challenges for every single family, just like stay-at-home had enormous challenges.”

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