The U.S. is in the midst of the largest COVID-19 wave we’ve seen since July 2022, according to CDC data. And, compared to the rest of the US, Western states are experiencing the biggest bump in wastewater COVID levels, with our region showing levels almost twice as high as the next highest region, the South.
Unsurprisingly, Nevada is one of the states where scientists are currently finding “very high” levels of COVID-19 in wastewater. But why?
“Every region kind of gets their turn,” explained Dr. Brian Labus, an epidemiologist and assistant professor at UNLV’s School of Public Health. “There's no real rhyme or reason as to why one area has more than another. It's not like there's a special characteristic of the West. We're just leading the country right now in disease. So, at some point in the future, it'll be another region, and we'll drop down on the list.”
While wastewater surveillance allows public health officials to analyze the rate of disease circulation happening within a community, it isn’t conducive to predicting future COVID-19 outbreaks.
“We know that COVID will increase as people spend more time indoors,” Labus said, “but it's really hard to say exactly what's going to happen months out from now. It's difficult even saying what's going to happen two or three weeks from now, let alone later this year or next year.”
In the meantime, another communicable disease, Mpox has been circulating in Africa — 14,000 people have reportedly been infected on the continent this year. And just late last month, local health officials reported seven probable and confirmed cases of the disease in Southern Nevada.
While all of the local cases are the clade II strain, which was also the dominant strain during the last Mpox outbreak in Las Vegas, the bigger variant of concern is clade I, which Labus noted is more severe.
“The death rate [of clade II] was about .3%,” Labus said. “With the new clade that's circulating, it’s the one that we used to see as kind of the endemic one that had a death rate of about 10 times that in areas of Africa.”
In any case, Labus stresses vaccination as a tried-and-true strategy for curbing local disease spread and staying healthy through fall and winter. For Mpox, the Southern Nevada Health District has clinics offering the protective vaccine — which is believed to be effective against both clades — at three different locations for eligible patients.
As for COVID-19, the CDC approved new vaccines by Pfizer and Moderna in late August, which are already being distributed at dozens of clinics and pharmacies around the valley. Labus says these shots are also protective against the current variants of concern.
“There’s always different variants circulating,” Labus said. “They're all kind of in the same group [now], though, which is how we were able to produce the new COVID vaccine.”
Guest: Dr. Brian Labus, epidemiologist and assistant professor, UNLV School of Public Health
