Evening traffic on the 405 Freeway in West Los Angeles was so sparse last week that 24-year-old Jerrold Smith II took out his iPhone and recorded it for posterity.
“Just so no one thinks I’m crazy, it’s 6 o’clock,” Smith said, wonder in his voice, as he drove south toward the 10 Freeway. Normally one of America’s worst bottlenecks, the interchange had barely a dozen cars nearby.
As coronavirus fears have swept Southern California, and reported cases of COVID-19 have surged in Los Angeles County, commuters still going to work have encountered a strangely unsettling phenomenon: a lack of traffic jams.
Free-flowing traffic seems more a cause for mourning than celebration as the region grapples with the pandemic. The dream of traffic getting better, Los Angeles commuters say, didn’t include a scenario like this.
“At first I loved it,” said Andrea Martín, 54, as she filled up her Toyota at a Chevron in Historic Filipinotown before driving to the Westside. “Then I realized: ‘Oh, this means people aren’t working.’”
Unfortunately, lighter traffic may be the only good news in all this. As it happens, California has been miserably lagging in testing, especially in LA which is a major world crossroad.
Testing Californians for the novel coronavirus remains hampered by a lack of key chemical components.
Calling it “imperative,” California Governor Gavin Newsom forcefully called upon federal officials, including at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, to provide “all the ingredients” for the tests.
“The tests are not complete,” Newsom said at a press conference Thursday. “meaning the test kits do not include in every case the RNA extraction kits, the reagents, the chemicals, the solutions…. I’m surprised this is not more of a national conversation,” he said.
Unlike a pregnancy test, the coronavirus kit isn’t ready to go right out of the box (Newsom likened it to buying a printer without ink). The kits are configured more for a research lab than a hospital, and it takes four to six hours to perform the test on patient samples.
About 1,500 Californians have been tested, though it’s likely that thousands of people have been exposed to the virus.
To fill in the gaps, Newsom said chemical components to complete the tests were being shared throughout the 18 labs in the state currently carrying out the testing. He said Quest Diagnostics, which has a lab in San Juan Capistrano, will open two new labs in California by the end of the month. He said the three labs, once online, will be able to process more than 5,000 tests per day.
There are about 17 million people in the LA metro area alone. There have only been 61 cases found here so far. But it’s quite clear that this is because they haven’t been testing. The biggest stories we’ve had here are of airport employees testing positive. That is not good. Not good at all. When it explodes here it will explode in a big way.
(If it doesn’t, we will be studied for decades to discover why it didn’t, considering the vast amount to travel within and outside the region along with the massive gatherings of people. Something in the water?)
Heres Newsom today: