LOS ANGELES (CNS) - Los Angeles Police Chief Michel Moore today reported a ``sharp and dramatic drop'' in new COVID-19 cases within the department, with only seven LAPD personnel testing positive for the virus in the last week.
``As a reminder, just some four weeks ago, those numbers were in the five-and-six-hundred range of new COVID cases,'' Moore told the Los Angeles Police Commission.
He added that 68 LAPD employees are at home recovering from the virus and the average recovery time is about 10 days.
Moore told the commission on Jan. 11 that the department was experiencing significant impacts from the virus but there were contingency plans to ensure that essential patrol, investigations and 911 services continued. Around that time, more than 1,000 personnel were off-duty due to the virus.
On Jan. 6, Mayor Eric Garcetti spoke alongside the chiefs from the fire and police department to assure the public that the departments still had adequate staffing levels to keep Angelenos safe.
The drop in COVID-19 cases is consistent with that of the county, Moore noted Tuesday. The number of COVID-positive patients in Los Angeles County hospitals has also been coming down, reducing the virus' impact on the local health care system.
The county's number of hospitalized COVID patients has been as high as 8,098 and as low as 213 during the two-year pandemic. It quickly shot up to over 4,800 in mid-January amid a winter surge in cases fueled by the Omicron variant, and has been steadily declining since then. The number fell below 1,000 on Sunday for the first time since December, and stood at 927 as of Tuesday.