In a followup to our story on Friday, June 5, California Governor Gavin Newsom and the California Public Health Department announced that Music, TV and film production may resume in California no sooner than Friday, June 12. Unfortunately, it looks like the timeline provided will not include Los Angeles County productions, which includes the daytime soap operas “The Bold and the Beautiful,” “Days of our Lives,” “General Hospital” and “The Young and the Restless.”
As previously reported, if local conditions are met TV/film productions could resume under the new guidelines presented. This means that to move forward California’s counties would have to meet the standards. Currently, only 50 out of the 58 counties have met that threshold. L.A. County currently does not meet that standard following an increase in local hospitalizations.
“This has been a slight increase over the last three days in the number of people hospitalized,” said Los Angeles County Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer, according to Deadline, “and we’ll need to make sure that we’re not starting to see a significant increase in the number of people requiring hospitalizations.” Hospitalizations had been on the decline until the “slight increase” was announced.
“If transmission has indeed increased, then the model predicts that we will have a continued increase in hospital patient volume over the next 2-4 weeks. And we would anticipate seeing that trend [become noticeable] over the coming 1-2 weeks,” said another official.
Last week, members of the state’ss Labor-Management Safety Committee Task Force — which includes TV/Film unions and academies AMPTP, SAG-AFTRA, the Directors Guild, IATSE and the Teamsters — submitted a 22-page white paper to the governors of California and New York, among others. The document includes a host of recommended protocols on the steps needed towards restarting productions while reducing the risk of spreading COVID-19.
Some of the recommendations include “[on] set hygiene, disinfection and maintenance, catering, mandatory employment of COVID-19 Compliance Officer(s), symptom screening, physical distancing, paid leave policies and COVID-19 training, among other critically important topics necessary for the safe resumption of production.”
At this time there is no way to determine if or when productions in L.A. Country can resume.
The county makes up a large portion of all TV/film production business in California.
We’ll keep you updated as this story continues to develop.