Clark County COVID-19 metrics drop, but mask mandate remains in place

Clark County on Tuesday showed more progress in curbing the current COVID-19 surge, but still remained a ways away from meeting the criteria needed to exit Gov. Steve Sisolak’s mask mandate.

The county reported 1,106 new coronavirus cases and 52 deaths, bringing totals posted by the Southern Nevada Health District to 476,590 cases and 6,945 deaths.

For a county to exit the state mask mandate for crowded indoor public spaces, it must record back-to-back weeks with a seven-day average case rate under 50 per 100,000 residents and a seven-day test positivity rate below 8 percent — metrics considered as posing a “moderate” or “low” risk of transmission by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Clark County’s numbers still stood well above those markers on Tuesday. The seven-day test positivity rate stood at 27.13 percent Tuesday morning, more than five percentage points lower than last week. The case rate also dropped significantly, sitting at 784.00 on Tuesday afternoon, more than 100 below the 1,801.9 reported at this time last week.

The county briefly dipped below a case rate of 100 per 100,000 people in November before the omicron-driven surge caused numbers to skyrocket across the board. For weeks, though, the numbers have been dropping quickly, in line with what public health officials had expected to see once the county hit the peak of the current surge.

Still, there’s a ways to go. State officials confirmed Tuesday afternoon that the entire state remains in the “high” transmission tier and thus will remain under a mask mandate for the foreseeable future. A few rural counties had flipped back and forth between transmission tiers, but the entire state has been in “high” for weeks.

New cases in Clark County were above the two-week moving average, which decreased sharply from 2,064 on Monday to 1,914. The two-week moving average of daily fatalities increased from eight to 10.

Data guide: COVID-19’s impact on Nevada

For months, state officials have reported more deaths on Tuesdays than over the weekend. But death numbers have been rising for the last week, even as other numbers have been dropping.

The 14-day test positivity rate, which tracks the number of people tested for COVID-19 who are found to be infected, decreased by 1.2 percentage points to 31.7 percent.

Meanwhile, the state reported 1,946 new cases and 61 deaths, bringing totals posted by the state Department of Health and Human Services to 625,955 cases and 9,012 deaths.

State and county health agencies often redistribute daily data after it is reported to better reflect the date of death or onset of symptoms, which is why the moving-average trend lines frequently differ from daily reports and are considered better indicators of the direction of the outbreak.

New cases statewide were below the two-week moving average, which dropped from 2,998 on Monday to 2,801. The two-week moving average of daily fatalities increased from 10 to 12.

Of the state’s other closely watched metrics, the 14-day test positivity rate decreased 0.8 percentage point to 32.8 percent, while the number of people hospitalized with confirmed or suspected COVID-19 cases stood at 1,797.

As of Tuesday, state data showed that 55.84 percent of Nevadans 5 and older had been fully vaccinated, compared with 55.23 percent in Clark County.

Contact Jonah Dylan at jdylan @reviewjournal.com. Follow @TheJonahDylan on Twitter.