The Omicron surge in January appears to have peaked on January 22. The highest recorded number of daily cases was 1,695 and the seven-day average high was 1,163. In less than two weeks, the average has dropped to 646.6 and the county's curve continues to drop. The Washoe County Health District recorded daily new cases of 369, 408 and 473 over the last three days. Those are still much higher than the peak in November of 2020 but they are trending in the right direction.
"Our peak, today, is at 135 percent of the previous high peak that we had, so we still have an incredible high number of cases," Kevin Dick, Washoe County Health District Officer said.
Dick says the Omicron variant is showing us things that we have not seen during the pandemic.
"The speed with which it hit our community, the incredibly rapid increase in cases that we saw and now we're seeing a significant downward trend," Dick said.
The decline in cases is welcome news for a community that is still seeing a 39 percent test positivity rate. The hope is that the numbers continue to drop like we have seen in southern Nevada.
"Our worst fear is that we plateau at some high level and don't continue with the decline," Dick said.
Testing is also dropping in Washoe County. Just last week, the Nevada National Guard deployed to help increase testing capacity at the Reno-Sparks Livestock Events Center. WCHD expanded its hours to include afternoons and Saturdays. That may have been short-lived.
"Just over the last week, we've seen that demand drop, precipitously, where we're now discussing scaling back our testing operations," Dick said.
Despite the positive trends, Washoe County's hospitals are at 90 percent capacity. Deaths are on the rise. Washoe County had 52 COVID-related deaths in January. 39 people died from the disease in the last 17 days. December had a total of 38 COVID-related deaths.
"We'll watch those numbers and hope for the best but with the number of cases that we've had, we would expect we'll see some increasing deaths," Dick said.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says its data shows that people who are not vaccinated are 97 percent more likely to die than those who are fully vaccinated and boosted. Dick says most of Washoe County's deaths were among people who did not get vaccinated. He says that the vaccine does lose some of its effectiveness over time, just like many other vaccines. That is why the booster is important.
"We're seeing even much greater protection if people follow through with getting that booster to rev up their immune system," Dick said.
Last week, the county's test positivity rate was more than 43 percent. That is down to 39 percent but it is still very high.
"Just indicates that we do have a lot of it in our community and a lot of people probably that aren't being tested that are positive," Dick said.
The CDC predicts that 65,000 Americans will die from COVID-19 over the next four weeks. Studies show that Blacks, Hispanics and American Indians are about twice as likely to die from COVID-19 than Whites. Asians are a little less-likely to die from the disease than Whites. The CDC says race and ethnicity are indicators of underlying conditions, including socioeconomic status, access to health care and exposure to the virus because of their jobs.
