Dr. Fermin Leguen, acting chief health officer of the Southern Nevada Health District, responds to a question on three new presumptive positive cases of coronavirus (COVID-19) during a news conference at the Southern Nevada Health District offices Wednesday, March 11, 2020.
Published Wednesday, March 11, 2020 | 11:56 a.m.
Updated Wednesday, March 11, 2020 | 3:29 p.m.
Three more people in Clark County have tested positive for the coronavirus, including a woman from New York who attended a conference at a Strip resort, according to the Southern Nevada Health District.
The new cases bring the number of people who have preliminarily tested positive for the virus to five in Clark County and seven statewide. One case here has been confirmed by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
A woman in her 40s was hospitalized in isolation on Sunday and was in stable condition, officials said. She is a visitor from New York who arrived in Las Vegas Thursday and attended the Women of Power Summit at the Mirage.
"The Health District is working with the facility and conference organizers to inform attendees and to identify close contacts of this individual," the agency said in a statement.
The CDC defines close contact as being within about 6 feet of someone with a confirmed case of COVID-19 for a prolonged period of time.
Dr. Fermin Leguen, the acting chief health officer for the district, said officials were investigating where else the woman may have been while in Las Vegas.
"We want to know every single detail of where she had been during those days and based on that, we will be approaching properties or individuals who have been (in contact) with her," Leguen said.
The other newly reported cases involve a man in his 60s and a woman in her 70s, officials said. Both are isolating at home and are close contacts of previously reported cases, officials said.
In a statement issued today, casino operator MGM Resorts International said professional cleaners were sanitizing the room at the Mirage where the woman stayed to CDC guidelines for eliminating the virus.
"We are currently coordinating with the Southern Nevada Health District to notify guests and employees who may have had close prolonged contact with the individual and are directing our employees to follow all self-quarantine requests," the statement said.
"The health and safety of our guests and employees is our highest priority," MGM said.
Leguen said that despite the new cases, the "level of transmission of this disease in Clark County is considered low. If that changes, we will communicate that to you as well.”
Testing for the coronavirus in Nevada, meanwhile, has increased by 12 times over the past week, as labs have tested 168 people whose results have come back negative, according to the state Department of Health and Human Services.
That number was just 14 a week earlier on March 4.
Nevada health officials are also monitoring 164 people who have traveled to a region where the virus is more widespread or come into close contact with a traveler from one of those regions. A total of 341 people have completed monitoring without developing any symptoms, officials said.
In Nevada, two public labs, the Nevada State Public Health Laboratory in Washoe County and the Southern Nevada Public Health Laboratory in Clark County, can conduct coronavirus tests.
Commercial labs Quest Diagnostics and LabCorp are also in the initial stages of conducting tests, although their capacity is not clear.
“We expect to be able to perform tens of thousands of tests a week within the next six weeks,” Quest said in an email to the Sun.
According to the CDC, 5,860 people have been tested nationwide, a number far behind the total number of tests done in other affected countries.
There are about 1,000 cases of the coronavirus in the United States, or eight times more than this time last week. At least 38 deaths have been attributed to the virus.
