New daily cases of COVID-19 in Washoe County have more than doubled in the last week. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says the county's seven-day case rate is 225 per 100,000 residents and a 24 percent positivity rate.
"That's a very high positivity rate and that indicates that there are probably many, many more cases out there," Kevin Dick, Washoe County Health District Officer said.
Researchers with the University of Nevada sample wastewater to find out how prevalent COVID-19 is in the community. WCHD says recent samples showed a 10-fold increase in COVID-19. By December 22, 90-95 percent of those were the Omicron variant.
"Right now, what we are seeing is major proportion is Omicron," Dr. Subhash Verma, Associate Professor with the UNR School of Medicine said. "Delta became maybe less than two to three percent."
"We can presume that almost all of the cases that are occurring in our community now are Omicron," Dick said.
Verma says the Delta variant was 100 percent of the wastewater COVID-19 samples during the last week of November. Researchers detected the first Omicron variant samples December 12 when it was 10 percent of the COVID samples. That was more than a week before the first person tested positive in Washoe County. It did not take long for Omicron to overtake Delta as the dominant variant.
"Just like 10 days or so, we have over 90 percent of the signatures of Omicron," Verma said.
The first samples happened in areas with a high number of travelers like the airport, hotels and casinos.
"Those places where we predict that there might be a lot of traffic or people coming in and staying over or coming to have recreational activities or what have you," Verma said.
Officials say those early cases came from travelers but that now the virus is spreading through community transmission. Data shows that Omicron attacks the upper respiratory system more than the lungs, so hospitalizations are less likely. Unfortunately, the variant could spread about six times faster than the original virus, and three times faster than Delta.
"I'm cautiously optimistic that Omicron is less severe," Dick said. "I think that what's unknown is with the exponential growth that we're seeing with Omicron."
Washoe County started testing at four new locations, Wednesday. The sites are at Bartley Ranch Regional Park, South Valleys Regional Park, North Valleys Regional Park and Eagle Canyon Park. Tests are free and do not require an appointment. Each location provides up to 400 tests each day, seven days a week from 8:00 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. or until they run out of tests.
