CBS is taking a close look at the increasing COVID-19 numbers in California before they launch another summer season of Big Brother.

Los Angeles County health officials reported 3,322 new cases of COVID-19 and 18 more deaths today, bringing the county’s totals to 133,549 cases and 3,809 fatalities.

Hospitalizations continue to rise, with 2,093 people currently hospitalized, 26% of them in intensive care units and 19% on ventilators.

Those numbers remain substantially higher than the 1,350 to 1,450 daily hospitalizations seen four weeks ago, according to the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health.

Barbara Ferrer, the county’s director of public health, warned that younger residents continue to drive the increasing numbers of infections, and those people can easily pass the infection to people more vulnerable to serious complications or death.

“Younger people infect everybody else,” she said. “They don’t just get to choose, I’m only going to infect a low-risk person that I know is going to be able to tolerate COVID-19. That’s not how it works. As a young person, you inadvertently, unknowingly could be infecting people even in your age cohort who then go on and infect somebody else who’s at risk and actually may even die.”

As Hollywood cautiously started moving to restart production even as coronavirus cases in California and around the country continue to spike, reality shows like Big Brother were thought to be best suited to adapt to the new normal of isolation and social distancing.

“Big Brother has to be one of the easiest [shows to produce now] because it is so contained,” Corrine Kaplan, a former contestant on Survivor, speculated in an interview with Yahoo! last month. “The issue becomes when the contestants are taken out and about. So, for example, those dates you see on The Bachelor, they would have to figure out how to film those and disinfect those locations.”

Indeed, even CBS sounded bullish this spring about the chances of Big Brother and Love Island, another show that puts its contestants into a bubble of relative isolation, airing new episodes this year.

“With Love Island and Big Brother, we still hope to have on the air this summer, it could be a little later than usual but we’re still optimistic about getting those on,” Kelly Kahl, president of CBS Entertainment, told Deadline in May. “Those shows turn around pretty quickly, Big Brother has live shows every week and Love Island literally airs the night after it shoots, those shows do not have long post processes.”

But the challenge for any production right now is the uncertainty of what lies ahead.

‘I just don’t see it happening,’ a former Big Brother contestant told JimHeath.TV via email last week. ‘It’s too dangerous, and CBS will never take the risk of getting people in the house and someone in production getting sick, closing the whole thing down halfway thru a season.’

There has been some activity behind the CBS Big Brother sound stage, but as of yet the cast is not even in sequester.

Last month, California Governor Gavin Newsom began allowing film and television production to resume.

In the week since that announcement, however, cases of coronavirus in his state have exploded.

And Los Angeles County, where Big Brother would be broadcast, is the hardest-hit area in diagnosed cases in the country.

“All production folks are going 100 miles an hour now to figure out what it means and how we’re going to do it,” an unnamed network executive said about production. “Nothing is going to shoot next week. Right now it’s just: How are we going to do it? I don’t think we’ll know that for weeks.”

Cody Nickson, who was a contestant on Season 19 of Big Brother, recently took part in a Q&A on Instagram.

When asked why prospective contestants seemingly haven’t been undergoing quarantine procedures similar to The Bachelor, Nickson alleged it isn’t the cast that’s the problem, but rather the other people involved with the show’s production.

“Cast quarantine isn’t the issue,” said Nickson. “The production crew is supposed to quarantine for two weeks and receive full union pay including overtime for those two weeks. That’s a lot of money that companies aren’t willing to spend. And then I believe the crew still can’t be free to go out with their families during production either. The restrictions are just too great now.”

The original Big Brother 2020 start date was supposed to be at the end of June.

When television production got shut down, the hope was for the season to begin filming in late July.

But now it appears far less likely that the show can start recording until August.

And that would push Big Brother into the fall lineup, something CBS executives have always been reluctant to do.

In the end, it’s not the contestants locked away in a house that are at greatest risk.

It’s the people working in the real world that could contract it.

And that risk is likely too great, even for a reality TV show.