A new Los Angeles County dashboard is giving officials and residents a near-real-time look at heat-related emergency visits and deaths, including which communities are most affected.
Another summer of extreme heat is sending many Californians to hospitals and emergency rooms in growing numbers. It is one of the deadliest climate hazards, yet its true human toll remains obscured, especially in Los Angeles County, where officials only just gained the tools to properly track it.
A crisis LA County could barely see until this year
Heat kills more Americans annually than floods, hurricanes, and tornadoes combined, according to the LA County Department of Public Health. Yet until this year, the county had no real-time way to track how heat was affecting residents. Heat-related illness data existed only in ad hoc reports, pulled together after the fact, not in anything resembling a live picture of who was ending up in the ER and why.
That changed on May 27, 2026, when LA County Public Health launched its first Heat-Related Illness and Mortality Dashboard. The tool tracks daily emergency department visit rates during heat season, May through October, alongside daily high temperatures recorded in downtown LA, and displays heat-related deaths by month based on death certificate data. Officials built it to be sorted by age, sex, race and ethnicity, and Service Planning Area, so the county can finally see which communities are hit hardest and where.
“Extreme heat is often underestimated, yet it causes more deaths than floods, hurricanes, and tornadoes combined, and the toll is expected to increase as temperatures continue to rise,” the department said in announcing the dashboard.
What the numbers already show
Even before the new dashboard, county data painted a troubling trend. Between 2005 and 2022, LA County averaged about 898 heat-related emergency department visits a year, ranging from a low of 456 in 2005 to a high of 1,352 in 2018. Heat-related hospital admissions averaged 196 a year over the same period, peaking at 461 in 2018.
The mortality trend is sharper. LA County recorded 125 heat-related deaths from 2015 to 2024, compared with just 34 deaths in the decade before that, 2005 to 2014. That is roughly three and a half times more deaths in the more recent decade. County researchers note it isn’t entirely clear how much of that increase reflects worsening heat versus a 2015 change in how heat-related illness gets recorded, but even accounting for that uncertainty, the direction of the trend is unmistakable.
The county has spent much of summer 2026 under repeated heat warnings and advisories, including an extended advisory issued in early August covering large stretches of the Antelope Valley, the San Fernando Valley, and the Santa Monica Mountains, among other areas. LA County Health Officer Dr. Muntu Davis has repeatedly urged residents to watch for symptoms like dizziness, nausea, rapid heartbeat, and confusion, warning that older adults, young children, outdoor workers, athletes, and people with chronic health conditions face the greatest risk.
Who’s most exposed, and the data gap that remains
Some of the sharpest disparities in LA County’s heat toll show up among unhoused residents. A statewide analysis from Tracking California found unhoused Californians are 38% more likely to end up in the emergency room during extreme heat than the general population, and unhoused residents accounted for nearly one in ten heat-related emergency department visits statewide in 2019 and 2020, despite making up less than half a percent of the population, a rate roughly 22 times higher than their population share. A separate multi-university study focused specifically on Los Angeles County found that daily heat exposure contributed to 5.2% of unhoused mortality in the county, with heat-related mortality risk for unhoused people estimated at 10 to 100 times higher than for the general population.
For years, none of this could be reliably measured. Unhoused patients without a permanent address were often logged as missing data and dropped from county-level health tracking entirely, a gap that persisted until California passed Senate Bill 1152 in 2018. That law, effective in 2019, required hospitals to record housing status at discharge, creating the first real window into a burden that had gone uncounted.
One group’s data remains conspicuously incomplete: Latino residents, who make up roughly 49% of LA County’s population, the largest single demographic group in the county. LA County’s new dashboard is explicitly built to break down heat illness and mortality by race and ethnicity, and an academic study of county Medical Examiner data has analyzed heat deaths by race and ethnicity, tracking Hispanic residents as a distinct category. But no current, publicly reported figure quantifies how heat-related illness or death specifically affects LA’s Latino population. Given that Latino workers in the county are disproportionately employed in outdoor and non remote jobs, and given the well documented pattern of health disparities that emerged for Latino residents in LA during COVID-19, when the county’s Latino mortality rate rose 48% during the pandemic, more than any other ethnic group, this is a data gap worth watching closely as the county’s new dashboard accumulates a full season of results.
Where this leaves LA County
The county now has, for the first time, the infrastructure to answer these questions in something close to real time. What it does with that data, and how quickly it can identify and respond to the communities being hit hardest, will determine whether Los Angeles’ hottest summers keep arriving as a slow, undercounted crisis or start showing up as a problem the county can see clearly enough to fix.
