Testing for coronavirus still limited in Clark County, across the nation

By Ray Brewer (contact)

Published Wednesday, March 11, 2020 | 2 a.m.

Updated Wednesday, March 11, 2020 | 11:09 a.m.

It’s been nearly two weeks since the first Clark County resident tested positive for coronavirus, and the valley remains limited in its capacity to screen for the illness.

It’s a similar narrative nationally, where 647 people in 36 states have been infected with the virus that has killed 25, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The full extent of the disease’s spread, both in Nevada and across the nation, is unknown as not enough people have been screened because of the slow rollout of testing kits.

In Nevada, about 170 people have been tested and four have come back presumed positive, officials said. Nationally, 5,860 people have been tested, according to the CDC.

By comparison, South Korea — one of the area’s hit the hardest by the virus, which late last year originated in China — is testing 15,000 residents daily, the Associated Press reports.

As of Monday, the Southern Nevada Public Health Laboratory, the lone public lab in the Las Vegas area that can test for the virus, had about 800 test kits available, officials said.

Mark Pandori, director of the Nevada State Public Laboratory at UNR, said the lab there has the capability to run about 2,000 tests.

Commercial labs Quest Diagnostics and LabCorp are in the initial stages of conducting tests, although their capacity is not known. "We expect to be able to perform tens of thousands of tests a week within the next six weeks," Quest officials wrote in an email to the Sun.

U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar said Monday that private contractors shipped 1 million tests to states and private labs. By the end of the week, he’s hopeful that 4 million tests will be available. It’s not known how many of those tests would go to labs in Nevada.

The CDC said 78 public health labs in 50 states were testing for the virus as of Monday.

Until efforts were ramped up to produce more tests this week, there were just 75,000 kits available across the nation of 327 million people. In Southern Nevada, there are 2.2 million residents, not to mention 42 million visitors a year.

Francisco Sy, chairman of the department of environmental and occupational health in the School of Community Health Sciences at UNLV, said concerns about limited testing capacity are understandable. But there shouldn’t be panic, he said.

“There’s no need for mass testing for psychological well-being,” he said. “The risk (of getting coronavirus) is still very, very low.”

Testing criteria for coronavirus include fever, cough, breathing difficulties and recent travel from an area with ongoing spread. But symptoms of the virus are similar to those of the common cold, flu and allergies, and testing is typically limited to people who are very sick or who have had contact with someone who is known to be infected.

“We are leaving that to the professional judgment of doctors and public health officials,” Azar said.

Brian Labus, an assistant professor of epidemiology at UNLV who teaches courses in infectious disease epidemiology and outbreak investigation, said that “anytime there is a new virus like this, people will be scared. The fear of dying is real.”

Labus was working at the Southern Nevada Health District in 2003 when the severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, outbreak hit.

That spread to 8,000 people worldwide and killed nearly 800 — numbers already dwarfed by the coronavirus, which has infected 118,471 and killed 4,267 globally, according to the Associated Press. No Nevadans were infected by SARS, and the local tourism industry wasn’t impacted.

“It’s hard to compare” the level of panic between the SARS and coronavirus outbreaks, he said.

Labus and Sy partnered to give a seminar Tuesday at UNLV about the coronavirus. They stressed not panicking, hygiene protocol and taking common-sense precautions.

This story was updated with the most current testing numbers in Nevada.