Los Angeles County reported 35 more COVID-19-related deaths over a three-day period ending Monday, March 20, along with more than 1,200 new cases.
The county Department of Public Health, which does not release COVID statistics on weekends, reported 12 virus-related fatalities from both Saturday and Sunday, plus 11 for Monday. The figures do not mean the deaths occurred on those days, only that the fatalities were reported on those dates. The new fatalities lifted the county’s overall virus-related death toll to 35,925.
A majority of people who die with COVID-19 are elderly or have an underlying health condition such as diabetes, heart disease or hypertension, health officials have said. Health officials also reported 669 new COVID infections from Saturday, 333 for Sunday and 236 for Monday, raising the cumulative total from throughout the pandemic to 3,720,572.
Overall case reports from the county are considered to be undercounts of actual virus activity, due to the number of people who use at-home tests and don’t report the results, or those who don’t bother testing at all. The seven-day average daily rate of people testing positive for the virus was 3.7% as of Monday, roughly on par with the past week.
An updated number of COVID-positive patients in Los Angeles County hospitals was not immediately available. As of Saturday, there were 456 such patients in the county, with 46 of them being treated in intensive care units.