Every time I go to work, I get scared about the risk, said Marisela Gonzalez, who works in produce at Albertsons in Tustin and contracted COVID.
Gonzalez says the other five members of her household got infected including her 29-year old daughter and she believes she passed the virus to them. I thought I was going to lose my daughter, but I couldn’t even go to the hospital with her because I was also sick, said Gonzalez.
Public health officials say many grocery store workers pick up the virus at work and spread it to their families. These increases (in outbreaks) reflect a pattern of transmission, from work site to home, and back to work site, said LA County s director of Public Health, Dr. Barbara Ferrer.
While CDC and state now say its OK to start vaccinating people 65 and older, LA County intends to continue prioritizing health care workers before making doses available to others.
Los Angeles County Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer said the county does not immediately have enough doses of the vaccine to expand the distribution to those 65 and older. She said the county s top priority remains getting health care workers vaccinated, with hopes of providing doses to another 500,000 such workers by the end of the month. We ve asked the state to give us more vaccine so we can use some of other other partners . to be able to open up for vaccinating those folks that are 65 and older quicker than the beginning of February, which is when we had planned to be able to complete health care workers and then move one, she said. We haven t heard aback from the state about vaccine availability and how it would be distributed.