Clark County bars stay closed; Washoe, Nye bars to reopen

CARSON CITY — The state’s COVID-19 task force departed from customary practice Thursday to approve on-the-fly coronavirus containment plans from two high-risk counties that will see long-closed bars and taverns open in a week at the latest.

While approving plans that will open bars in Washoe County by 11:59 p.m. Wednesday, and in the town of Pahrump in Nye County sooner, at the same hour Thursday, the task force voted to keep closures in effect in Clark County because of persistent high infection metrics there. Bars will also stay closed in Elko County.

“I think there is a ways to go, strictly speaking, with numbers,” said Caleb Cage, the task force’s chairman and state COVID-19 response director. Clark County’s latest infection rate data shows an 11.2 percent test positivity rate. The state’s target threshold is 7 percent.

All four areas were not scheduled for task force review on the bar question until next week. But with improving infection numbers in most areas of the state, and with counties submitting more comprehensive mitigation plans that addressed task force concerns over enforcement and compliance, the panel took up motions from the floor Thursday to expedite openings in Washoe and Nye.

Task force members Thursday praised Washoe’s mitigation plan as a model of county-level management, a discussion that prompted the move to approve bar openings there a week early. Approval for Pahrump followed, with bars already open elsewhere in Nye. No additional action was proposed for Elko, whose positive test rate is 12.6 percent. Only Storey County’s positive rate of 20 percent is higher, but that represents just one positive test out of five conducted.

The task force has met weekly since Aug. 13 to assess county-by-county infection rates based on three criteria, with counties that exceed measures in two of those criteria being tagged as high-risk for infection spread and required to submit mitigation plans to the panel. After the Washoe and Nye plans were approved Thursday, task force member Dagny Stapleton, executive director of the Nevada Association of Counties, moved to similarly approve Clark’s request for reopening bars.

But Clark’s high positive rate, combined with adequate testing there, implies a higher rate of ongoing community spread than in Washoe, whose opposite numbers — insufficient testing but a positive rate of just 7.3 percent — imply a much lower rate of spread.

“I think it’s too premature,” said Terry Reynolds, director of the state’s Department of Business and Industry, of the Clark proposal. “I think we need time to get enforcement together if we’re going to go in this direction.”

Nevada now has five counties in the high-risk category. Three counties came off the list Thursday — Lander, Lyon and Nye — but Eureka County was added to Churchill, Clark, Elko and Washoe for having a per capita COVID-19 case rate “almost negligible above” the permitted level, state biostatistician Kyra Morgan said at the meeting.

Contact Capital Bureau reporter Bill Dentzer at bdentzer@reviewjournal.com. Follow @DentzerNews on Twitter.