Clark County backslides on mask mandate, others show progress

While some other counties in Nevada are making progress toward exiting the state’s face mask mandate, two key COVID-19 metrics for Clark County have been moving in the wrong direction over the past month.

The county’s rate of new COVID-19 cases for the last seven days per 100,000 residents stood at 150.53 as of Tuesday afternoon, slightly lower than the 151.85 reported a week ago. That means it remains in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s “high” risk category for transmission of the disease after briefly dipping into the “substantial” category last month.

While the rate has stabilized over the past week, it is nearly 30 percentage points higher than a month ago, signaling that the county has seen a rebound in the spread of the disease caused by the new coronavirus during the holiday season. That trend could be exacerbated by the arrival of the omicron COVID-19 variant, which was reported for the first time in the state on Tuesday by the Southern Nevada Health District.

The second key COVID-19 metric used as a gauge for when a county can exit the mask mandate is the test positivity rate, which tracks the percentage of people tested for the disease who are found to be infected.

The county’s positivity rate, which was at 7.7 percent on Tuesday, tells a similar story to the new cases numbers, with a 0.1 percentage point increase over the last week but an increase of more than 1.3 percentage points over the past month.

The county calculates its rate based on a 14-day moving average, while the CDC uses a seven-day average. As of Tuesday, that rate stood at 9.05 percent, putting the county in the “substantial” risk of transmission category for that metric.

Improvements in other counties

For a county to exit the state mask mandate for crowded indoor public spaces, it must record back-to-back weeks with a seven-day average case rate under 50 per 100,000 residents and a test positivity rate below 8 percent — both considered as posing a “moderate” or “low” risk of transmission by the CDC.

While Clark County has struggled, other parts of Nevada have seen improvementver the past month.

State officials announced Tuesday that most residents will be required to mask up through the end of the year, but one county, Esmeralda County, has exited the mandate after recording no new cases for weeks and therefore landing in the “low” transmission rate.

Storey County was in the “low” tier on Tuesday, meaning it will need to maintain that for another week to end the mask mandate there. But because of its small population, a few positive cases can quickly affect long-term metrics like the new case and test positivity rates, and it has repeatedly gone back and forth between transmission tiers.

White Pine County was in the “moderate” tier as of Tuesday, and also will exit the mask mandate if it can maintain that rating for another week.

In Clark County, other metrics of the spread of the disease have been mixed of late.

On Tuesday, the health district reported 489 new coronavirus cases and 15 deaths in the county during the previous day.

Updated figures posted by the district pushed totals in the county to 350,742 cases and 6,334 deaths.

Data guide: COVID-19’s impact on Nevada

New cases were well above the two-week moving average, which nonetheless decreased by 22 to 383 per day. Fatalities were more than triple two-week moving average of deaths per day, which dropped by one to four.

The number of people hospitalized with confirmed or suspected cases of COVID-19 in the county increased by 35, to 576, according to data from the state Department of Health and Human Services.

State updates

The state, meanwhile, reported 677 new COVID-19 cases and 26 deaths during the preceding day. That brought Nevada totals posted by the state Department of Health and Human Services to 466,583 cases and 8,201 deaths.

Nevada’s 14-day moving average of new cases decreased to 501 per day from 531 on Tuesday. The two-week average for fatalities held steady at seven per day.

Of the state’s other closely watched metrics, the two-week test positivity rate dropped 0.1 percentage point to 7.5 percent, while the number of people in Nevada hospitalized with confirmed or suspected COVID-19 cases rose to 691, 32 more than on Monday.

The state also updated its reporting on so-called breakthrough cases.

An update distributed Tuesday showed a total of 1,276 such cases involving fully vaccinated individuals, although that number only includes cases that result in hospitalization or death. Of those, 50 occurred in the previous week, according to the report dated Sunday.

The state also reported 12 breakthrough deaths over the previous week, bringing the state total to 295. Sixty-one percent of breakthrough cases and 72 percent of breakthrough deaths occurred in people over the age of 70, according to the report.

Overall, 23.1 percent of breakthrough hospitalizations led to death, it said.

As of Tuesday’s report, state data show that 53.53 percent of Nevadans 5 and older had been fully vaccinated, compared with 52.81 percent in Clark County. That number fluctuates widely throughout the state.

Contact Jonah Dylan at jdylan@reviewjournal.com. Follow @TheJonahDylan on Twitter.