As L.A. County enters the fourth month of “Safer At Home” restrictions amid the coronavirus pandemic, county Department of Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer has released a statement, addressing the threats she’s received during the COVID-19 emergency.
“COVID-19 has upended thousands and thousands of lives all across the nation. The virus has changed our world as we know it, and people are angry,” Ferrer said in a prepared statement released Monday.
This comes as a total of 83,397 cases of COVID-19 have been reported countywide as of Monday morning, along with 3,120 deaths related to the virus, per Public Health.
“We are working tirelessly to slow the spread of COVID-19 and find good solutions for the future of our communities,” Ferrer added. “And while the devastation experienced by so many is heartbreaking, it is also disheartening that an increasing number of public health officials, across the country — myself included — are threatened with violence on a regular basis.”
Ferrer went on to address the death threats she said she started receiving last month, when someone “very casually” suggested that she should be shot in the comment section of Public Health’s Facebook Live COVID-19 briefing.
“Our job and our calling is to keep as many people as safe as possible during this pandemic,” she said. “We did not create this virus. We come into work every single day prepared to do our very best, prepared to work with everyone, with all of our partners, to try to continue to contain this pandemic and to try to continue to minimize the loss of life. And while frustration boils over in our communities as people are done with this virus, this virus is not done with us.”
