Los Angeles County health officials, in what has been a daily routine this week, announced eight new cases of the novel coronavirus on Friday, March 13, bringing the total number of confirmed cases in the county to 40.

Update: 11 new LA County coronavirus cases, officials say; total now 53

Health officials, meanwhile, continue preparing for a further increase in the spread of COVID-19. The county’s Office of Emergency Management has been working on a plan to open quarantine centers, where individuals who believe they might have been exposed and have no good place to stay, can go while they await test results, said Barbara Ferrer, the county’s top health official.

“My approach from the beginning,” Ferrer said, “has been the more prepared we are, the better we are able to be responsive in a meaningful way.”

The cause of three of the new cases were from unidentified sources, meaning there was no evidence of international travel or known exposure to someone who was diagnosed with the respiratory disease — another sign of possible community spread. Two of the new confirmed cases were being hospitalized.

The total number of confirmed cases includes four in Long Beach, one in Pasadena and six possible cases of community transmission. There has been one death.

Children’s Hospital Los Angeles reported Friday that it was treating a child between the ages of 6 and 9 with COVID-19. The child had an underlying condition that likely made them vulnerable to the virus, the hospital said in a statement.

Ferrer on Friday continued to stress, as she has in days prior, that if everyone does their part to stay home and away from large gatherings, the spread of the virus can be slowed and eventually contained.

“(Social distancing) is one of the only tools we have to flatten out this curve,” Ferrer said. “We need to make sure we don’t see an explosion of the number of people who need to be seen in our hospitals and emergency rooms.”

Ferrer said the county would release on Monday, March 16, a list of confirmed cases with general locations only, not with identified names. She said the department had avoided reporting on the location of confirmed cases because there were no public exposures they could identify. But the number of cases has continued to increase, and investigators are working to track down all the individuals those with the coronavirus may have been in contact with — a job that can be assisted by releasing more information, Ferrer said.

There were no known cases of COVID-19 among students or faculty of Los Angeles Unified School District, Ferrer said; the district announced it would close for at least a couple of weeks. The county so far has completed testing on roughly 110 people and about 75% of those individuals were negative, Ferrer said; others have been tested at commercial labs. Testing guidelines still require that individuals must exhibit symptoms and have traveled somewhere affected by the novel coronavirus or made contact with an infected person.

Stories this week out of Italy, where more than 1,000 people have died so far, in particular from the Lombardy region where hospitals are in many cases overwhelmed, has local health officials here in Los Angeles concerned. If severe and drastic actions are not taken now to limit exposures, California and other states throughout the country could experience similar strains on their healthcare system, they warn.

On Thursday, Mayor Eric Garcetti joined city and county leaders to recommend that all events with more than 50 people be cancelled, a suggestion that goes further than Gov. Gavin Newsom’s announcement Wednesday night that gatherings of at least 250 people should be cancelled.

All major professional sports leagues and just about every theaters announced the suspension of their seasons on Thursday. A cascade of school districts announced closures Friday

COVID-19, which stands for coronavirus disease 2019, is caused by a virus named SARS-CoV-2. Symptoms associated with the respiratory disease, which appear two-to-14 days after exposure, include fever, a cough and shortness of breath. While most people — including healthy young adults — will experience mild symptoms, the disease can be severe and possibly fatal for at-risk groups, such as the elderly and those with other health problems.

Riverside County has confirmed eight cases, five travel related and three locally acquired as of Thursday. Orange County had nine confirmed or presumed positive cases of coronavirus as of Friday.

Statewide, there were 247 cases across and five deaths, as of Friday morning, according to the California Department of Public Health; that number did not include passengers on the Grand Princess cruise ship currently docked in Oakland. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, meanwhile reported on Friday that there were about 1,700 across the nation, including 41 deaths, in the U.S.

Globally, there have been 136,895 confirmed cases of the new coronavirus, as of Friday morning, according to the World Health Organization; there have been 5,077 deaths. The global pandemic has now touched 123 countries, up from 118 on Thursday.