Washoe County’s District Health Officer Kevin Dick said today that while COVID-19 cases are still in the low range, a new sad milestone was reached this week.
“We have the grim milestone that we’re reporting today of our 1,200th COVID-19 related death in Washoe County,” he said.
That’s in two years of the pandemic. By way of comparison, Dick said flu deaths prior to the pandemic averaged about 40 per year.
District officials confirmed that most deaths are from those who were unvaccinated.
Nearly 120 of the 1,200 COVID-19-related deaths were breakthrough cases, district officials confirmed.
New COVID cases, however, remain in the low range, minus an uptick this week from last because of the new BA.2 omicron variant.
“We have 169 cases that were reported from the week of Tuesday, April 19 through Monday, April 25,” Dick said. “Our seven day moving average that we’ll be reporting tomorrow is going to be in the range of around 24 new cases per day. That’s up from a bit over 16 new cases per day that we were reporting last week, so about a 50% increase in cases over the last week.
“We now know from our wastewater sampling that that’s 99% of what’s showing up in wastewater and we’ve seen similar increases in other parts of the country that are occurring from the BA.2 variant.”
Hospitals are not seeing major impacts from new COVID cases.
Dick said CVS pharmacies now offer antiviral COVID-19 pills for treatment if people contract the coronavirus disease.
