Indoor shopping malls reopen in Los Angeles County

LOS ANGELES - Indoor shopping malls will be permitted to reopen Wednesday in Los Angeles County at 25% capacity, just in time for holiday shopping.

Malls won't look quite the same as they did before the pandemic. Additional health and safety protocols are in place to keep both staff and customers safe.

Everyone will be required to wear a face-covering and food court dining and common areas must remain closed under the county's health order.

Food courts will be permitted to sell food, but for take-out only.

The county on Tuesday announced another 30 coronavirus related deaths, while health officials in Pasadena announced two more fatalities and Long Beach added one more. The new deaths lifted the countywide total since the pandemic began to 6,684.

Another 990 cases of the virus were also confirmed by the county, while Pasadena reported 13 and Long Beach 51. The cumulative countywide total of cases stood at 275,920.

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Hospitalizations in the county related to the coronavirus were at 685 as of Tuesday, up from 674 on Monday.

"While we have seen significant improvement since the summer, daily case numbers indicate COVID-19 continues to spread across L.A. County at high enough rates to limit the reopening of businesses and schools," public health director Barbara Ferrer said in a statement Tuesday. "If we work together to limit transmission and slow the spread of COVID-19 to 700 or less new cases per day, not only will the county move to a less restrictive tier that allows us to consider additional reopenings, we will save lives."

Los Angeles County remains in the most restrictive level of the state's four-tier economic reopening roadmap. Although the county's testing positivity rate qualifies the county to move up to a less restrictive tier, the average number of new cases per 100,000 residents is still too high to permit a change.

CNS contributed to this report.