Nevada’s Chief Biostatistician Kyra Morgan and State Epidemiologist Melissa Peek-Bullock announced Thursday the state is moving into a new phase of dealing with COVID-19 data.
Nevada is shifting to community measures that focus on minimizing the impact of severe illness and protecting the most vulnerable using vaccines, therapeutics and prevention.
Peek-Bullock said the pandemic is becoming endemic, “but we have the tools we need to contain it.”
They said the state’s numbers are much better than in the past with just 129 new cases a day on average. That is the lowest incidence since almost a year ago. In addition, there are just 247 people in Nevada’s hospitals with just 48 in intensive care and 22 on ventilators. Those numbers are the lowest since June 2021.
The state is moving from a “public health emergency to routine disease surveillance efforts.”
The new home virus tests, they said, make it impossible to measure testing capacity or test positivity since those results aren’t necessarily reported to the state. So negative lab reporting will no longer be required in Nevada.
The changes reflect that the COVID-19 virus is now considered endemic — something that is regularly found in the community.
So the state is updating the health response dashboard to reflect these changes. The county tracker and dashboard pages dealing with test positivity and volume are being removed. Positive cases will be tracked exclusively on laboratory data.
The state will now be tracking trends and impacts on the community for the long term.
The goal continues to be helping people make the best decisions for their health and health of their families, they said.
The dashboard will now be updated once a week on Wednesdays.
