Thursday, May 11, 2023 | 4:14 p.m.
The Southern Nevada Health District says it will shut down its COVID-19 testing clinic this summer and slow to monthly data reporting of local virus hospitalizations and deaths as the federally declared COVID-19 public health emergency ended Thursday.
Dr. Fermin Leguen, district health officer for the Southern Nevada Health District, said Thursday that the end of the emergency declaration after more than three years does not mean the pandemic has ended, or that the health district will stop protecting the public from the disease. The virus is still circulating, and still has the potential to be fatal, he said.
“Even so, we don’t see today the severity of fatalities that we’ve seen in previous years,” Leguen said.
Dr. Cassius Lockett, SNHD’s director of disease surveillance and control, said the testing clinic at health district headquarters in Las Vegas will close in July, although clinics at the College of Southern Nevada’s North Las Vegas and Charleston campuses will remain open through next March. Vending machines placed at government and community centers around the county will also dispense free at-home kits through May 2024.
Lockett said the disease data currently being posted on the SNHD’s website on a weekly basis — which includes case counts, hospitalizations, 7-day averages of daily new cases by age group, test positivity and deaths — will be pared down to monthly hospitalization and death trend reports. Those are now more accurate in assessing COVID’s impacts than the previous standards, case counts and testing positivity rates, he said.
Hospitalization data is also just as good.
“There’s a 99% concordance rate with case data,” Lockett said.
The health department will also continue to rely on wastewater surveillance, which follows how much virus is shed into sewage, to track new and emerging variants.
According to Nevada Health Response, the 14-day moving average of case counts statewide was 66 as of Monday. The 14-day rolling average was 389 cases as of May 8, 2022; at the peak of the delta variant in January 2022, the rolling case average was about 6,500 cases.
Lockett said virus cases remain undercounted because of the wide use of at-home test kits, the results of which are not reported to the government. People with less-severe COVID-19 may also opt for self-care, he said.
But Southern Nevada has long returned to its pre-pandemic normal. Tourism is booming, entertainment venues are packed and restrictions have been lifted — the state dropped its mask mandate in February 2022.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services said in a statement this week that “we are now in a better place in our response than at any point of the pandemic and well-positioned to transition out of the emergency phase and end the COVID-19 (public health emergency).”
