COVID-19 metrics end a third week of improvement in Clark County

Most Clark County coronavirus metrics continued to decline Friday, ending a third week of decreasing COVID-19 rates.

State public health data showed the 14-day average new cases rate in the county declined by 171 to a new total of 1,293. The actual new cases reported was even lower Friday, at 1,029. That broke a string of two days with new case totals under 1,000.

In all, Clark County has recorded 479,516 cases of COVID-19 since the start of the pandemic.

The daily positivity rate in the county also continued to decline Friday, dropping another percentage point to 28.1 percent.

However, the average daily death rate rose by two, to 12 on Friday, and the county reported 50 more deaths. That bring the county’s total to 7,043 deaths as of Friday.

State and county health agencies often redistribute daily data after it is reported to better reflect the date of death or onset of symptoms, which is why the moving-average trend lines frequently differ from daily reports and are considered better indicators of the direction of the outbreak.

Public health officials have long said that hospitalization and death numbers usually trail the test positivity rate and daily case numbers as a wave peaks and then recedes, so the current trends aren’t surprising.

Data guide: COVID-19’s impact on Nevada

Encouraging trends

As of Friday, Clark County had 76 fewer people hospitalized with suspected or confirmed COVID-19 than the day before, for a new total of 1,216.

“While current trends are encouraging, the Health District continues to urge people to use the tools they have available to help protect themselves and others,” the health district said in a statement Friday.

At the height of the omicron surge, Clark County reported a record-breaking 6,110 new COVID-19 cases on Jan. 7. Two weeks later, the county’s positivity rate rose to 38 percent and hospitals were pushed to their limits with 1,700 COVID-19 patients.

In early January, the Southern Nevada Health District and its partners were conducting 90,000 tests a week, Cassius Lockett, the district’s director of disease surveillance and control, said at a press briefing Wednesday.

This week the health district conducted only half of that.

“Right now we don’t have any testing concerns,” Lockett said Wednesday. “The demand did decline significantly at most of our testing sites. There are no longer any long lines or things of that nature.”

The testing site at Fiesta Henderson closed Wednesday, but Lockett said he wasn’t sure when the county’s largest site at Sam Boyd Stadium would be shut down. The decrease in demand also comes as the state plans to make over 500,000 at-home tests available to local communities and many Nevadans started to receive at-home tests from the federal government’s initiative this week.

The results of those at-home tests won’t be counted in publicly released data, which could skew the state’s numbers.

At the state level, 1,898 new cases and 60 new deaths were reported Friday. Nevada has reported 631,309 cases and 9,144 deaths as of Friday.

The state’s daily positivity rate fell by 0.7 percentage point, to 29.5 percent. The average daily new cases fell by 232 to a new average of 1,978.

The average daily deaths rose by two, matching Clark County numbers. There were 91 fewer hospitalizations statewide for a new total of 1,449 patients with confirmed or suspected cases of COVID-19 on Friday.

As of Friday, 59.94 percent of eligible Nevada residents over the age of 5 were fully vaccinated, including 55.33 percent of Clark County residents.

Potentials of subvariant

To exit the mask mandate, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advises that counties should have back-to-back weeks with a seven-day test positivity rate average of under 8 percent and a case rate of less than 50 per 100,000 people.

As of Friday, the CDC reports Clark County has 543.3 cases per 100,000 residents and a seven-day positivity rate of 24.41 percent.

Nationwide, all but six counties fall into the CDC’s high transmission category, meaning the CDC advises that 99.75 percent of the country should be under a mask mandate.

The nearest county to Nevada with a low transmission rate, meaning less than 10 cases per 100,000, is Terrell County, Texas.

Last week, the Southern Nevada Health District reported the valley’s first case of BA.2, omicron’s subvariant. County officials say there is no evidence it is more contagious or deadly than the original omicron. As of Friday, three cases of the subvariant had been reported in Clark County.

A federally-funded website called Outbreak.info showed Friday that 309 cases of the subvariant have been reported nationwide since Dec. 14.