• US Government Agency FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) approved the state’s request for 75% reimbursement for all the hotels being activated for this disaster. This has never been done in a disaster before. This allows us to pay for the rooms without causing us to face bankruptcy
• Tuesday, we handled 2,509 calls through the Mayor’s Help Desk Phonebank. These calls are picked up by an incredible team made up of 311 operators and Mayor’s Office staff who manage the Mayor’s Help Desk phone lines. For questions, please call: 213-978-1028.
• Starting today, we will open testing to all County residents through our portal & with the County, will be opening up 2 more sites in the County and one more in LA City, which will be a walk-up site. All are accessible through our portal, with same eligibility requirements: Coronavirus.lacity.org. Completed 10,027 tests, including 1623 tests alone on Tuesday alone.
• Through the portal Coronavirus.lacity.org/rooms, more than 150 new hotels and motels have inquired about providing rooms for people who need to be isolated or quarantined but whose housing situation does not allow them to do that easily. The County will assess those rooms to determine if they are suitable; hopefully through this effort, we will be able to add hundreds of more rooms to the 900 that the County, LAHSA and the City have already secured.
• Through the partnership with UPS, Everlywell and the City we will have testing up this week in Skid Row through the clinics that serve homeless people. UPS will drop off the test kits to places at service organizations that have medical professionals on site who can administer the tests.
• To increase pedestrian safety, we have begun turning on pedestrian lights and signals automatically in heavily pedestrian areas such as downtown and MacArthur Park – to remove the need for people to touch buttons that many others have touched in order to safely cross the street.
• The Mayor ordered the temporary suspension of all farmers’ markets in the City. In order to reopen, all farmers markets must submit plans to the Bureau of Street Services laying out the steps they will take to enforce safe distancing among people who shop there. BSS will then monitor the markets to make sure they are indeed enforcing safe distancing. This is not an outright ban because access to a safe food supply is essential during this crisis.
• LAPD visited 46 nonessential businesses today that last week resisted closing down – if those businesses continue to operate, they will be referred to City Attorney for prosecution.
• Convention Center Hospital – The City received 250 beds from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) that will be used COVID-19 patients with lower acuity and symptoms not as intense.
• The mayor’s office will also like to invite you to join the County Board of Supervisors for their daily briefings every day at 1:00pm until further notice. You can watch the County briefing on the County Channel, Facebook, or on local news stations.
