LA County Could See 1,000 New COVID-19 Cases Per Day Next Week

L.A. County announced Friday that three additional COVID-19 testing sites have come online. And as more testing happens, the number of confirmed cases is expected to jump.

The drive-up sites are in Redondo Beach, Pomona and Palmdale. People 65 or older with symptoms and other at risk groups are eligible for a nose or cheek swab.

Specimen collection operations like these are part of the reason there's been a significant increase in the amount of people tested. That number is at about 26,000 people now in the county.

“We were well under 50 tests a day when we started, we thought we were doing well when we were able to get capacity to up to two or three hundred tests a day,” said L.A. County Public Health Director Dr. Barbara Ferrer. “And now we’re testing over 7,000 people a day.”

Ferrer says the goal is to test 10,000 people per day. But that milestone will be accompanied by a bump in the number of cases, she said.

As early as next week, Ferrer expects to see as many as 1,000 new COVID-19 cases a day.

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