It’s official: the South African variant of COVID-19 has reached Reno. The arrival of the COVID-19 B1.351 strain was confirmed on Thursday by health officials — the first known case of the virus in Nevada. It is also the latest COVID variant to reach the state, which saw its first case of the U.K. variant in Las Vegas back in January. The variant was detected during routine testing and sequencing, said Dr. Mark Pandori, director of the Nevada State Public Health Laboratory. The specimen was first sequenced on Feb. 13 and confirmed in the lab by Wednesday.
The Nevada State Public Health Lab has confirmed the first case of the South African variant of COVID-19 in the area. The new strain was detected in a sample collected in Reno. The NSPHL sequenced the specimen on Saturday, Feb. 13, and through further analyzation of the data that detected the B.1.351 strain, confirmed it as the South African variant on Wednesday, Feb. 17.
Dr. Mark Pandori of the Nevada State Public Health Laboratory explained that the more the virus spreads, the more mutations will develop. "That's yet another reason we need to do all these things: to keep people healthy, but keep 'this' from becoming 'something else,'" Pandori said. "That variation is what leads a virus from becoming a bad situation to a worse situation. If we let this thing creep around ever more, we're going to see more variation," Pandori said.
Dr. Mark Pandori calls the U.K. variant "concerning" for its faster spreading abilities, but data from Moderna and Pfizer show these vaccines are still effective against it.
Mark Pandori, director of Nevada's public health lab, told KHN, "I predict that we are missing cases of reinfection," adding, "They are very difficult to ascertain, so you need specialized teams to do that work, or a core lab."
The board will also welcome Seema Donahoe, creative director at the University of Nevada, Reno School of Medicine and Allison Williams, APR, specialist, communications writer at the University of Nevada Reno as new members.
Having held leadership positions everywhere from Johns Hopkins to UC-Davis to his current position of Director of the Communication Science Program in the Department of Physiology and Cell Biology at the University of Nevada-Reno School of Medicine, Dr. Ebenezer N. Yamoah knows a few things about running a productive research group.
Integrated academic health systems bring together three complimentary initiatives — patient care, research and medical education — and meld them into a single mission, each enhancing the others synergistically. The University of Nevada, Reno School of Medicine (UNR Med) and Renown Health are actively exploring the creation of such a health system.
At a recent joint meeting of the Reno and Sparks city councils and the Washoe County Commission, local elected officials discussed the need to reexamine several features of the interlocal agreement that has governed the Washoe County Health District and its board of health for nearly four decades.
As of Tuesday, the Reno lab had conducted 832 genetic sequences on positive tests since mid-December, said Mark Pandori, director of the lab at the University of Nevada, Reno School of Medicine. The lab has found no cases of the U.K. strain outside of Clark County, or of other newly identified strains first detected in Brazil and Southern Africa. This leads Pandori to believe that none is widespread in Nevada, though any could be present.
The medical community in remote Elko County — about 400 miles north of Las Vegas — pulled together by necessity during the pandemic. UNR medical residents staffed hotline phone banks during the shutdowns in early 2020, said Gerald Ackerman, assistant dean for rural programs at UNR's medical school. The residents are part of the Elko Family Medicine Residency Program, where medical students train by seeing primary-care patients at a Nevada Health Centers-run clinic in Elko.
According to a recent survey, 65 percent of Nevadans, and 77 percent of healthcare workers will likely get the vaccine when it becomes available to them. In addition, 83 percent of healthcare workers said they would recommend the vaccine to their patients. The survey was conducted by the University of Nevada, Reno School of Medicine in partnership with the School of Community Health Sciences, Immunize Nevada and the Nevada Department of Health and Human Services.
Vast swaths of America’s privatized and decentralized system of health care aren’t set up to send samples to public health or academic labs. “I’m more concerned about the systems to detect variants than I am these particular variants,” said Mark Pandori, director of Nevada’s public health laboratory and an associate professor at the University of Nevada-Reno School of Medicine.
Nevada has detected one case of the U.K. variant so far. According to a statement from the Nevada State Public Health Laboratory on Jan. 25, director Mark Pandori, PhD, said the strain was found from a symptomatic woman in her 30s, with an address in Las Vegas. "It is copying itself a lot right now, which can lead to mutating," Pandori explained. "The more a virus spreads in a community, the more opportunities it has to make mistakes when it copies itself. This leads to what we see here and it's a very natural part of viral evolution."
Vast swaths of America's privatized and decentralized system of health care aren't set up to send samples to public health or academic labs. "I'm more concerned about the systems to detect variants than I am these particular variants," said the director of Nevada's public health laboratory, Mark Pandori, an associate professor at the University of Nevada-Reno School of Medicine.
The Nevada State Public Health Laboratory announced Monday the first known case in the state of the strain that first emerged in the United Kingdom last fall.
Dr. Mark Pandori, the director of the lab at the University of Nevada, Reno School of Medicine, said the variant was discovered after genomic sequencing late last week of a specimen from in a symptomatic woman in her 30s in Las Vegas.
The Nevada State Public Health Laboratory (NSPHL) at the University of Nevada, Reno School of Medicine (UNR Med) has detected the first known Nevada case of the new B.1.1.7 coronavirus strain, according to a press release.
As thousands of people patiently add their name to wait lists for the vaccine, and with new doses arriving at the health district on a weekly basis, medical students are getting ready to help. Dr. Tim Baker discusses how medical students are getting trained to volunteer assistance with COVID-19 vaccination efforts, if and when needed.
A new study found about one-third of Nevada residents currently are unlikely to get vaccinated for COVID-19 but their explanations of their reasoning suggests it’s possible to persuade many to change their minds, one of the lead researchers said.
Reno, Sparks and Washoe County elected officials are meeting this week to consider increasing their influence over the Washoe County District Board of Health.
A new study found about one-third of Nevada residents currently are unlikely to get vaccinated for COVID-19 but their explanations of their reasoning suggests it’s possible to persuade many to change their minds, one of the lead researchers said.
“(That) means that people need to continue with the measures of mask wearing, hand washing and physical distancing that we know work,” said Dr. Mark Riddle, professor and associate dean of clinical research at the University of Nevada, Reno, School of Medicine. “While we don’t know exactly how the new variant renders the infection more contagious, such personal protective measures provide broad protective ability and thus need to be continually employed in our communities.”
A survey by UNR’s School of Medicine released this week that sampled 5,349 Nevadans between Nov. 25 and Dec. 31 found that 65 percent of people were likely to get the vaccine and 35 percent were unlikely. Among the various age groups, those 18-24 and 55 and older were most likely to say they would receive the vaccine.
