Clark County adds 12,701 new COVID-19 cases over 3 days

The omicron variant gave no indication of slowing over the weekend, with Clark County on Monday reporting 12,701 new COVID-19 cases and 21 additional deaths during the preceding three days.

State COVID-19 data was not updated Monday because of the Martin Luther King Jr. Day holiday, so hospitalizations and the 14-day moving averages for new cases, deaths and the test positivity rate for the county could not be calculated.

But data posted by the Southern Nevada Health District showed that new COVID-19 cases averaged nearly 4,234 per day from Friday through Sunday, far above the two-week average of 3,316 cases per day in the county as of Thursday.

Three of the county’s four key COVID-19 metrics — new cases, hospitalizations and test positivity rate — have skyrocketed over the past month, though none more than new cases. The 14-day moving average for the metric has jumped more than 770 percent since Dec. 17 as the highly contagious omicron variant of the coronavirus has raced through the community.

The past week has seen some stabilization in the daily numbers, albeit at very high levels. The county has now reported at least 3,000 new cases per day for seven straight days, including a record 6,110 cases in a single day.

Fatalities from the disease caused by the new coronavirus on Monday also were above the 14-day average of five per day as of Thursday. Reporting of deaths is typically suppressed on the weekends and none were reported on Saturday or Sunday, so the figure was likely higher than reported.

Data guide: COVID-19’s impact on Nevada

Totals for the county stood at 431,842 COVID-19 cases and 6,646 deaths after Monday’s update.

As of Thursday, the county’s 14-day average test positivity rate stood at 35.9 percent, its high point of the pandemic, according to state data.

There were 1,513 confirmed and suspected COVID-19 patients at Southern Nevada hospitals as of Thursday, just 64 fewer than the high of 1,577 seen at the height of last year’s winter surge of the disease.

We’ll learn how both those metrics fared over the weekend when the state Department of Health and Human Services updates its data on Tuesday.

State totals as of Thursday were 549,198 COVID-19 cases; 8,627 deaths; 1,711 hospitalizations; and a 32.8 percent positivity rate.

The rate of vaccination among eligible Nevadans 5 and older stood at 55.17 percent.

Contact Mike Brunker at mbrunker@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-4656. Follow @mike_brunker on Twitter.