COVID-related deaths in LA County top 17,000.
Fatalities have soared during this latest surge with close to 10,000 deaths reported over the past three months, most of them in January.
And deaths remain high averaging more than 200 a day over the past week.
"We're still living through the nightmare of a surge," says Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer. "For two days last week we reported that more than 300 people died each day. This is the very real cost of not following the public health rules"
The county's reporting fewer than 4,000 new cases for the first time in more than two months.
That's still much higher than what we were seeing at the start of the surge.
Hospitalizations continue to drop but are still more than two times higher than the peak of the summer surge.
