Nevada reports biggest jump in COVID-19 cases since late August

Nevada reported an additional 772 cases of the coronavirus on Friday —the highest one-day increase since late August.

The Department of Health and Human Services also reported that the state recorded six additional deaths.

Caleb Cage, who directs the state government’s COVID-19 response, said during a regular briefing with reporters on Friday that the high volume of positive cases across the state reflects two days’ worth of lab results that were reported late.

Lab results from University Medical Center, which processes a high volume of tests, were not received on Sept. 30, he said. Tests processed by the hospital accounted for nearly half of all the testing reported on Friday.

The updated data posted to the state’s coronavirus website brought totals in Nevada to 81,182 cases and 1,609 fatalities. The 772 new cases is the highest increase since Aug. 21, when 849 cases were reported.

An average of 490 new cases have been added daily over the past seven days, according to a Review-Journal analysis. As recently as Sept. 14, the seven-day average was as low as 264 daily cases.

The infection rate, considered by experts to be a better indicator of the outbreak than daily death or case totals, rose slightly to 11.51 percent on Friday. The rate has been slowly increasing since Sunday, when the figure was at 11.44 percent.

The Review-Journal calculates the percentage as the number of cases divided by the number of people who have been tested.

The state, which bases its positivity rate on the number of tests conducted, calculated the cumulative rate at 9.8 percent, the same figure it’s been since Tuesday. The state’s methodology yields lower figures because many people get tested multiple times, increasing the numbers upon which the percentages are based, which in turn lowers the percentages.

Updated Clark County data posted to the Southern Nevada Health District’s website showed 663 additional cases in the county. The six additional deaths reported in the state all occurred in the county.

The updated figures brought totals in the county to 68,162 cases and 1,400 deaths, according to the county health district.

In a statement Friday morning, the health district said that like the state data, the increase in case numbers was due to delayed laboratory reporting.

When asked if recent event ssuch as the reopening of bars could have played a role in the increased cases, health district spokeswoman Jennifer Sizemore said that daily case counts are “not the best indicator of the effect events may be having on our community.” She said the health district’s redistribution of cases, which attempts to reflect when someone first starts experiencing symptoms, is a better measurement.

Both the county and state health districts redistribute data this way after initial daily counts are released. In the county data, the numbers are redistributed by other factors if symptom onset data is not available for a case, using the person’s diagnosis date, lab collection date, when the case was reported to officials, or when the case was entered into the district’s surveillance system.

Contact Katelyn Newberg at knewberg@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0240. Follow @k_newberg on Twitter. Review-Journal staff writers Michael Scott Davidson and Mary Hynes contributed to this report.