Coronavirus can be contained, Nevada health officials tell lawmakers

CARSON CITY – The state’s top medical and infectious disease officials reaffirmed to a legislative committee Wednesday that Nevada has seen no cases of the new coronavirus from China to date and that people experiencing telltale respiratory symptoms more likely are suffering from seasonal flu.

In response to questions from two doctor lawmakers who serve on the legislative health care committee, the medical experts also stated that the virus that causes COVID-19, which has killed some 2,000 people and sickened tens of thousands, mostly in China, is a manageable and containable illness here.

“This particular virus, with good public health awareness, limiting where the exposure is, we can contain this virus,” said Assemblywoman Robin Titus, R-Wellington, a family medicine doctor. “So I don’t want folks leaving here thinking, ‘Oh, my God, we’re going to die if this virus gets out,’ because that’s just not the case. We just have a golden opportunity to contain this virus, and, frankly, it’s probably less deadly than influenza from what I’m reading.”

Ihsan Azzam, chief medical officer for the state Division of Public and Behavioral Health, agreed in a response to Titus that the main goal of health officials outside China, where the virus originated and continues to infect and kill people, is early detection and containment.

“It is not currently spreading in the U.S. or Nevada. It’s expanding in China,” Azzam said. “Non-pharmaceutical measures” — public outreach by health agencies and medical professionals, early detection and evaluation of possible infections and quarantine in some cases — are proving effective.

To date the United States has 15 confirmed cases of the virus, two-thirds of those in people who recently traveled to China. Nevada has investigated four potential cases but none has been confirmed.

“We had four individuals who were considered at high risk, and a few of them had symptoms, so they were at highest possible risk,” Azzam said. “And when they were tested, fortunately all four tested negative.”

“So realistically then, not everybody who gets a fever and a cough in this flu season, as it were, has coronavirus?” asked Sen. Joe Hardy, R-Boulder City, also a family physician and associate dean of clinical education at Touro University in Henderson. “And even those for that are at high risk, (it doesn’t) necessarily mean that they have the coronavirus because those people can get the flu, which is hard to discriminate between the coronavirus and the influenza?”

Azzam agreed.

“Actually, once people get fever or cough, most probably in the U.S., they are having influenza,” he said. “I would really use this opportunity, if I can to say, that is never too late to seek … vaccination.”

The state agency has set up a website for information related to the virus.

As of Feb. 8, there have been 26 flu deaths reported in Clark County this season.

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