LOS ANGELES, July 29 (Xinhua) -- Los Angeles County, the most populous county in the United States, reported Wednesday the largest increase of confirmed COVID-19 cases and related deaths, 4,825 and 91 respectively, in the past 24 hours.
The figures reflected a large backlog in the California state's electronic lab system with as many as 2,000 cases coming from said delay, but it was an alarm as well, Barbara Ferrer, the county's public health director, said in her daily online briefing.
"If you take away the fluctuations we've had on lab delays, we are really about 1,000 cases per day over where we were about a month ago," Ferrer said. "We do hope we will begin trending lower, but we are going to need at least several weeks before we can get back to where we were in mid-May and the beginning of June."
As of Wednesday, in the county with a population of over 10 million, a total of 4,516 people have died from the epidemic, and a total of 183,383 people have tested positive for it. Enditem
