LAS VEGAS (AP) — A hospital company with several facilities in southern Nevada saying Monday it will cut to five days its return-to-work target for medical personnel who test positive for COVID-19.
Dignity Health, with suburban medical centers in Henderson, southwest Las Vegas and North Las Vegas, joined facilities around the nation taking steps to let nurses and other workers infected with the coronavirus stay on the job if they have mild or no symptoms of illness.
A company statement pointed to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines and attributed the move to “the spread and impact of the COVID-19 omicron variant in southern Nevada, and in anticipation of a continued increase.”
The CDC in December cut its isolation and quarantine recommendation in half, from 10 days. It cited evidence that people with COVID-19 are most infectious two days before and three days after symptoms develop.
Many hospitals around the U.S. are swamped with cases and severely short-staffed because so many employees are out with COVID-19. Officials blame the spread of the highly contagious omicron variant, which has the number of new cases of COVID-19 exploding nationally but appears to be causing milder illness than the delta variant.
The Nevada Hospital Association last week declared a staffing crisis in southern Nevada and some rural areas, citing rising hospitalization numbers and staffing shortages. Officials issued a plea for people not to crowd emergency rooms in search of coronavirus tests.
State health officials on Monday reported 1,356 people hospitalized with confirmed or suspected COVID-19 in Las Vegas and surrounding Clark County. The Las Vegas Review-Journal reported the number was up from 1,194 on Thursday.
Test positivity, a key measure of the number of people tested and found to have COVID-19, has skyrocketed in recent weeks in the Las Vegas area — to nearly 29% on Monday.
The figure was 5.9% on Nov. 1, after a low of 3.2% last June and a previous peak of 20.4% about a year ago. The World Health Organization goal is 5% or below to relax mitigation measures.
Demand for COVID-19 tests has created long lines at a relocated drive-through testing center set up at Sam Boyd Stadium southeast of downtown Las Vegas, and the Southern Nevada Health District has announced that test centers will open in coming days at two shuttered casinos — Texas Station in North Las Vegas and the Fiesta Henderson.
Case numbers are climbing sharply in Nevada, according to state health data, but few new coronavirus deaths have been reported. The number of deaths statewide is 8,528 since the pandemic began in March 2020.
Clark County on Monday reported nearly 7,900 new COVID-19 cases during the weekend, pushing the county’s overall case total past 400,000. The Las Vegas area has had about three-fourths of the more than 525,000 coronavirus cases confirmed statewide.
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