>we have 33k cases and 1600 deaths in a population of 4mil
>

The numbers they read off daily are for LA County, which includes Long Beach, Pasadena, Palmdale and fucking Lancaster. LA County covers an enormous area.

Considering the county is the highest populated county in the US, and has a higher population than most states (and many countries), we have avoided the worst of it so far. The population + density of LA County makes the slow, rolling opening essential. We have to be more careful than other places, bottom line. Things will start to slowly open here in the next three months (they already have), with a possibility of normalcy by early August. This has been the timeline given by experts for a while now. Clickbait headlines aside, nothing has changed for LA.

The numbers here have stabilized. And the higher case count can be attributed to a lot more testing (which is good) and backlog of reporting positive cases from different labs (which is annoying).

A few relatively positive notes on LA County:

Number of new hospitalizations down.
Number of positive cases in relation to amount of people tested down.
Rt is below 1 (if the R is below 1, each person is getting less than 1 person sick. the
number was at like 6 early on)

https://twitter.com/lapublichealth (there's a few people that have been really good at objectively analyzing the data in the daily update threads)