Carson City flagged by state for elevated COVID-19 transmission rates
Submitted by Jeff Munson on Mon, 10/26/2020 - 5:21pm
Carson City has been newly flagged for elevated disease transmission, according to a report Monday by Nevada health officials. Adjacent Lyon and Washoe counties also remain flagged.
Nevada COVID-19 Response Director Caleb Cage and Deputy Administrator of Community Health Services Julia Peek provided updates on Nevada’s ongoing COVID-19 response, testing and reporting during a media teleconference.
The following bulletin provides facts, figures, and informational items from the call. As a reminder, data is provided in a dashboard on the home page of the Nevada Health Response website and can be accessed 24 hours a day.
SUMMARY:
The updated County Criteria Tracker is released every Monday and can be found on the NV Health Response dashboard. Changes from last week are as follows:
— Carson City, Humboldt and Nye counties been newly flagged. Carson City and Humboldt are for high case rates per 100,000 over the last 30 days (Sept. 26-Oct. 25) and high test positivity over a 14 day period with a seven day lag (Oct. 5-Oct. 18) Nye County is for not meeting the criteria for average number of tests per day and test positivity over the last 14 days.
— Clark, Elko, Lincoln, Lyon and Washoe remain flagged for elevated disease transmission. All are due to high case rates per 100,000 over the last 30 days (Sept. 26-Oct. 25) and high test positivity over a 14 day period with a seven day lag (Oct. 5-Oct. 18)
— This is Washoe’s fifth, Lyon’s third and Clark, Elko and Lincoln’s second consecutive weeks on the list.
The Nevada COVID-19 Mitigation and Management Task Force will hold an emergency meeting Thursday, Oct. 29 at 1 p.m. with Washoe County officials to discuss their plan to combat increasing COVID-19 trends in the county.
According to the report, Washoe County has seen an increasing trend in the COVID-19 burden on the county since September 28, as evidenced by data tracked by the State, and by data reported from the Washoe County Health District.
As of Monday morning, Nevada has logged 96,178 cases, an increase of 475 new cases.
— 343 or approx. 72.2% were in Clark County.
— 80 or approx. 16.8% were in Washoe County.
— 52 or approx. 11% were spread throughout the rest of the State.
For the most recent 7-day period, cases are growing at a rate of 0.8%, or 762 new cases per day. Nevada has now completed a total of 1,212,437 molecular tests since the beginning of COVID-19.
The test positivity rate over the last 14 days is 9.8%. Nevada’s healthcare infrastructure continues to be moderately impacted by COVID-19 hospitalizations, despite reports of significantly increasing COVID-19 case counts and positivity rates.
Statewide hospital occupancy rates are at 72%.
— ICU occupancy rate is at 60%.
— Ventilator use is at 25% statewide, for all patients.
Nevada has approximately 531 total hospitalized COVID-19 patients as of Sunday, October 25, 2020.
— This number includes 449 confirmed patients and 82 suspected patients.
• Relative demand placed on hospitals based on occupancy is 11% of occupied beds (total COVID-19 patients/ total patient census).
Statewide traditional case investigation and contact tracing efforts are ongoing, and Nevadans are encouraged to download the COVID Trace app to their smartphone to supplement those efforts.
— Since the beginning of COVID in the state through today, a total of 24,390 cases have been identified as a result of contact tracing efforts. This now represents 25.4% of the total cases reported to date.
— Since June 18, 2020 surge staff have logged a total of 142,359 calls to close contacts.
— From Oct. 19 - 25, the surge staff agents logged a total of 15,048 calls to close contacts.
— Related to the text messaging to close contacts, for last week there were over 14,704+ total text messages exchanged, with 5,365+ unique outbound communications and a peak response rate of 86% from unique contacts on 10/19.
— There are now 56,019 downloads of the COVID Trace app, as of last night. There have been 10 cases having had the app downloaded at the time of their diagnosis and 15 exposure notifications as a result.
