Behind the COVID-19 Numbers

Though state officials and many news outlets have reported that Nevada saw 1,536 additional COVID-19 cases on Friday, Nov. 27, it is in fact, the smallest increase in 13 days.

Then State officials reported 2,912 new COVID-19 cases and 24 additional deaths in Nevada the following day. So far, officials have not said how the 1,376 new cases and deaths are connected to one another.

Two days prior, the Associated Press declared on Nov. 25 that COVID-19 is spreading so fast in Nevada that one person is diagnosed with the virus every minute and someone dies from it every two hours. Where and how they drew this conclusion has yet to be explained by the news service.

Six counties had not reported increased cases by late Friday morning including Lyon, Storey, Douglas, Washoe, and Nye. On Tuesday morning, Dec. 1, it was reported that Storey County the only Nevada County that is not flagged for increased COVID transmissions.

The updated figures posted to the state’s COVID-19 website brought totals to 149,229 case and 2,119 deaths since the start of the pandemic. Nevada had reported more than 2,000 cases in seven of the past eight days (Nov. 20- 27) with two new fatalities, raising the number of deaths to 2,095.

Case totals and positivity rates have been increasing since mid-September, and the number of weekly deaths increased in November compared with October. State officials reported 108 deaths in Nevada last week, the highest number of weekly deaths since 128 were reported in mid-August.

The number of weekly deaths had been on the decrease between August through October. Data also shows that the seven-day average of new cases reported remained above 2,000 on Friday, which is more than twice the average reported in the beginning of November.

By calculating the number of cases divided by people tested since the start of the pandemic, Nevada’s positivity rate reached 15.34 percent on the 27th, an increase of 0.19 percentage points from the previous day. Meanwhile, the state health department calculates a positivity rate over a two-week period, and the rate increased by 0.2 percentage points on Saturday, reaching 16.8 percent.

The Washoe County Coroners Office states that it fears the recent explosion of COVID-19 cases in Northern Nevada could soon overtake not only the ability to treat the sick, but also store the dead. With this are media reports accompanied by photographs of empty beds and unused ventilators in the makeshift COVID-19 ward that Renown Medical Center has created from one of its covered parking garages.

Gov. Steve Sisolak said in a recent press conference that his ‘Stay at Home 2.0’ plan was based on hospitalizations of COVID-19 patients. According to Sisolak, the high numbers are going to lead to the possibility that there will eventually not be enough beds for new cases.

Using data from the Nevada Hospital Association’s COVID-19 Daily Statistics, for Nov. 17, 2020, the state had 6,660 beds available. Only 1,105 or 16.59% of those beds were being used for COVID-19 patients.

Sisolak directed that on Nov. 24, Nevada be placed on a three week “statewide pause” through Dec. 15.

In March of this year, Sisolak banned the use of hydroxychloroquine for Nevada patients with COVID-19. But a new study, set to be published in the ‘International Journal of Antimicrobial Agents’ in December, found that “Low-dose hydroxychloroquine combined with zinc and azithromycin was an effective therapeutic approach against COVID-19.”

A total of 141 patients diagnosed with the coronavirus were treated with the three-drug cocktail over a period of five days and compared to a control group of 377 people who tested positive for the virus but were not given the treatment. The study found that “the odds of hospitalization of treated patients was 84% less than in the untreated patients,” and only one patient died from the group being treated with the drugs compared to 13 deaths in the untreated group.

The result was 84% fewer hospitalizations for patients treated with hydroxychloroquine.