As the city issued stay-at-home orders during its brutal winter surge, retail shopping stayed open. How much did it contribute to the city’s tragic spike in cases and deaths?
Los Angeles in the middle of January was a landscape of contradictions. To drive around the city and county was to toggle between the woeful and the mundane. Ambulance crews queued up in hospital emergency bays for hours waiting for spaces to open, while grieving families were turned away from mortuaries that didn’t have temporary containers large enough to accommodate the number of people who had died from COVID.