CDC confirms Northern Nevada patient’s coronavirus infection

RENO — The federal Centers for Disease for Control and Prevention has officially confirmed the first of four positive tests in Nevada for coronavirus infection.

The CDC’s confirmation that a Reno-area man who tested presumptively positive last week has been infected is mostly a procedural step, as Washoe County officials have treated the case as positive since his initial diagnosis. The confirmed Reno-area case involves a man in his 50s who is self-isolating at home. The area’s other presumptive positive case is a man in his 30s.

“People have been asking how long it’s going to take” to receive official CDC confirmation, Kevin Dick, the Washoe County Health District officer, said in a briefing Tuesday. “Based on that experience, we’re running about four days right now with getting that back from the CDC.”

The Reno man was the second Nevada resident to test positive for the virus, with his case announced only hours after health officials in Southern Nevada revealed on Thursday that a man in his 50s who recently had traveled to Washington state and Texas had tested positive and was in isolation at a Clark County hospital. The Southern Nevada Health District has not yet said if the CDC confirmed the earlier patient’s case.

Dick also outlined actions the county was taking to prepare for the return of residents who are among 49 Nevadans on a cruise ship now docked in Oakland and under quarantine. All of the Nevada ship passengers are reported asymptomatic for the illness.

Dick also gave a warning about the community acting on false information circulating about COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus. On Monday, a Reno Patagonia outlet store closed for the day and sent its staff home after an employee incorrectly reported his roommate had the virus.

The false alarm “required us to devote our already-thin resources to tracking that down and it unnecessarily alarmed our community,” Dick said. “We should be taking appropriate precautionary measures … but it’s important that we approach this in a calm way, that we not panic about what’s going on.”

He repeated the contagion risk in the region is comparatively low but added that while the outbreak appears to be lessening in China, where the virus originated, it was too soon to believe that the risk of the disease spreading here had subsided.

“We’re still very low with two cases,” he said. “But knowing that we have other communities that have had additional cases and some communities that have many more than ours, I wouldn’t be surprised if we did detect additional COVID-19 cases.”

Contact Bill Dentzer at bdentzer@reviewjournal.com or 775-461-0661. Follow @DentzerNews on Twitter.