On Friday, December 29, LA County Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer sneakily issued a mask mandate for healthcare facilities in the county, saying that the county had entered the CDC's "medium" level for COVID admissions, which triggered the change. 

The change comes after @lapublichealth updated its health officer order Wednesday, indicating a potential mandate.

An official press release was not issued.https://t.co/cSErL9t7FC

— MarlaTellez (@MarlaTellez) December 30, 2023

At the time of publication, the link to the order itself was not working; the Department of Public Health claims that it's due to a server problem causing the link to not work on certain devices (apparently, the devices of journalists are particularly hard-hit). But screenshots of it can be found here.

The Health Officer Order was originally issued in September 2023 and related to requirements for healthcare workers to have a current flu shot and COVID booster or mask during the upcoming "respiratory virus season." The December 27 revision cites the "ongoing risk" posed by COVID-19 as part of the justification and orders visitors to be masked as well.

Curiously, the Department issued a press release on December 28 titled "Continued Increases In COVID-19 Transmission, Hospitalizations Indicate Need for Common-Sense Protections Against Infection" that didn't mention the revision to the existing Health Order that allegedly went into effect the day before. No press release was issued when the county reportedly went into the CDC's Medium Level on December 29, triggering the mandate's implementation.

Dr. Brad Spellberg, Chief Medical Officer at Los Angeles General Medical Center (formerly LA County/USC Medical Center), the county's largest hospital, poured ice-cold water on Barbara Ferrer, Ph.D.'s hysteria.

In his "Soothing Thoughts" segment during LA General's weekly update, Spellberg made these very important points:

• LA General is not seeing COVID pneumonia ICU admissions or intubations
• LA General no longer performs COVID tests on admission
• Other hospitals in the county continue to COVID test on admission, leading to artificially inflated COVID hospitalization rates
• COVID is not going to go away; it is now an endemic virus and "does not distinguish itself from other upper respiratory viruses"
• There is community COVID spread because COVID is a winter virus
• COVID levels at LA General are "considerably" below 2022 and with much milder disease

Dr. Spellberg's full comments are below:

We haven't talked about COVID for a long time, for obvious reasons, but there were questions submitted about it, and Lord knows there's been a lot of media attention around it again.

So, we are continuing to not see COVID pneumonia. We are not seeing patients getting admitted to the ICU with pneumonia, we are not seeing patients get intubated because of COVID.

There certainly is community COVID spreading. COVID is a winter virus. There's also community other viruses spreading, because these respiratory viruses happen in the winter months. COVID is not going away. It is endemic. It is one of many now endemic viruses, which in my mind does not distinguish itself from other viruses. Frankly, I'm kinda more afraid of influenza than I am of COVID at this point.

And if you look at the numbers that we've seen in our hospital, they are below this year the level they were last year at the same time, considerably so, and with milder disease even than we were seeing last year, which was milder than the year before that, which was much milder than that horrible 2020 winter.

So we don't - everybody needs to just take a few breaths. Yes, there is COVID. There is influenza. There is RSV. They are causing upper respiratory tract infections, generally mild. They are not resulting in significant hospitalization rates at our hospital. We, of course, do not test all admissions. We only test symptomatic people.

There are other hospitals out there for whatever reason that are continuing to test all admissions, which makes the numbers of hospitalizations appear artificially inflated. I don't know why that's still happening, but it is, so that's driving a lot of the concern. So everybody just relax. We're gonna be okay. I'm more afraid of other things right now than I am worried about respiratory infections.

For anybody who's taken a college biology course, or perhaps even a high school biology course (depending on the quality of the curriculum/instruction), what Spellberg said makes perfect sense. It's wonderful that he calls out the hospitals who are still testing all admissions, because the skewed data that provides creates huge problems for everyone who wants to live normally. If the hysterics were to be intellectually consistent, they would test for all viruses upon admission. But let's not give them any ideas.