Garcetti says LA County has 1% of the diagnosed cases of covid in the entire world

Garcetti: we have started assuming that if we haven’t been affected by covid that other people aren’t infectious. Need to get back to assuming other people are infected

Garcetti: just because it’s been a couple months that doesn’t mean things are suddenly safer

It’s a real Dr. Jekyll and Mr Mayor thing

Garcetti: County has 850 available hospital beds incl. ICU. hospitalizations are up above 1900 after a recent minimum of 1300.

Garcetti: I always said we would halt reopening if data said we should. Says Newsom reached out to him about closing bars and Garcetti gave support before the order.

He is not owned, nor is he turning into a corn cob.

LA al fresco is getting a plateful of Garcetti Arrabbiata

Garcetti is running down a list of donations of PPE from overseas including the Taiwanese embassy and Vietnam airlines who he mentions want to start nonstop flights to LAX. Odd

. @ReporterClaudia comes in hot: City has been saying they respond to data but anyone paying attention was expecting cases to increase after reopening, how do we reconcile this?

Garcetti says they have been responsive to data and we are still below recent peaks so there(?), says we could not strangle our economic position by keeping everything closed. LA can't be an island of keeping things closed.

Credits the SF Bay for doing things together, unsubtly blame-shifting to other cities. This is truly a leaderless city (let alone the region)

Garcetti keeps saying "we're not at the peak of where we were with hospitalization" but he only minutes ago said that we expect to eclipse that recent maximum by next week.