Los Angeles, Jul 30 (IANS): Los Angeles County, the most populous in the US, has reported the highest single-day increase of confirmed COVID-19 cases and deaths.

Wednesday's figures -- 4,825 cases and 91 deaths -- reflected a large backlog in the California state's electronic lab system with as many as 2,000 cases coming from said delay, but it was an alarm as well, Barbara Ferrer, the county's public health director, said in an online briefing.

"If you take away the fluctuations we've had on lab delays, we are really about 1,000 cases per day over where we were about a month ago," Ferrer was quoted as saying by the Xinhua news agency.

"We do hope we will begin trending lower, but we are going to need at least several weeks before we can get back to where we were in mid-May and the beginning of June."

As of Wednesday, in the county with a population of over 10 million, a total of 4,516 people have died from the virus, and a total of 183,383 people have tested positive for it.

California, one of the worst hit states in the US, has so far reported a total of 470,000 COVID-19 cases, with 8,902 deaths and no recoveries.