Tracking visitors with virus a hard game in Vegas
It was among the last of the big conferences before the coronavirus pandemic shuttered the massive casinos lining the Las Vegas Strip in March.
More than 1,000 people gathered at MGM Resorts International’s Mirage Hotel & Casino for the Women of Power Summit, after organizers of the networking event for executive women of color assured attendees that the risk of infection was “extremely low.”
That seemed a reasonable bet, given that Las Vegas had yet to record a single coronavirus case. What no one realized was that one of the conference speakers, a New Yorker, already had contracted the virus by the time she landed at McCarran International Airport on March 6. Two days later, she was in the hospital.
Nevada’s case count now stands at more than 9,600, and as of Sunday afternoon, 438 people had died. But the case involving the Women of Power speaker is nowhere to be found in those grim totals, despite that she stayed, tested positive, was hospitalized and recovered in Las Vegas.
That’s because the state’s coronavirus tally doesn’t include visitors who get sick there or soon after returning home. Instead, only state residents who test positive are counted.
If one of the trickiest aspects of containing the pandemic is figuring out when and where people contract the virus and then quickly tracing their contacts, there perhaps is no place in the nation where that’s as tricky as in Las Vegas, where last year guests outnumbered residents 20 to 1.
Casinos along the strip last week reopened their doors to a flood of visitors, masked and unmasked but equally eager to test their luck after a 78-day hiatus.
An over-the-top water show set to Elvis’ “Viva Las Vegas” at the Bellagio Hotel marked the occasion, and a marquee sign at the Aria Resort & Casino summed up Sin City’s new social distancing ethos: “Think dirty thoughts, but keep your hands clean.”
As Nevada embarks on one of the most epidemiologically complex reopening experiments in the nation, Gov. Steve Sisolak said he’s confident that “every precaution possible” has been taken to ensure that the famed resorts can both serve guests and protect public health.
Dealers and players are separated by plastic glass screen, dice are doused in sanitizer after every throw, and guests, encouraged though not required to wear masks, are subject to mandatory temperature checks.
“I don’t think you’ll find a safer place than Las Vegas,” Sisolak said during a recent call with reporters.
But he added that he’s tracking the state’s case numbers closely and will “pull back if it causes any type of problem.”
But as the MGM case illustrates, those numbers offer only a partial picture of virus spread, one that could prevent officials from seeing and acting upon dangerous spikes in real time.
Moreover, the state can’t readily identify clusters of cases among employees at a given casino. And while the contact tracing challenges faced by Las Vegas are extreme, they highlight larger national systemic problems.
The resident-focused tallying method used by Nevada is shared by states across the nation, adopted to avoid counting the same cases multiple times.
The problem with that methodology, experts say, is that it can obscure whether a venue with superspreading potential is becoming a hot spot, particularly in tourist destinations where visitors from around the world gather en masse.
Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, said the system worked fine for past outbreaks of diseases such as Legionnaires’ disease. But COVID-19, he said, is different.
“Here you have not only an issue of magnitude, but also a long incubation period and the factor of super-spreaders — one person can go into a casino and infect 200 people,” he said. “It’s a real challenge for any place with a high concentration of visitors, and it needs to be addressed.”