Is Vegas Going to Shut Down Again
'Prowl Ships on Land': As Las Vegas Reopens, a Huge Test for Casinos
While the contact-tracing challenges faced by Las Vegas are farthermost, they highlight larger systemic problems in monitoring the coronavirus across the country.
It was amidst the concluding of the big conferences before the coronavirus pandemic shuttered the massive casinos lining the Las Vegas Strip in March. More than than 1,000 people gathered at MGM Resorts International'south Mirage Hotel & Casino for the Women of Power Summit, after organizers assured them that the take a chance of attending the networking outcome for executive women of color was "extremely low."
That seemed a reasonable bet, given that Las Vegas had yet to record a single coronavirus example. What no one realized was that 1 of the conference speakers, a New Yorker, had already contracted the virus by the fourth dimension she landed at McCarran International Aerodrome on March vi. Two days after, she was in a hospital.
Nevada'southward instance count now stands at more than than 9,600, and as of Dominicus afternoon, 438 people had died. But the example involving the Women of Ability speaker is nowhere to be institute in those grim totals, despite the fact that she stayed, tested positive, was hospitalized and recovered in Las Vegas.
That is because the state's coronavirus tally does not include visitors who get ill there or soon afterward returning home. Instead, only state residents who exam positive are counted.
If one of the trickiest aspects of containing the pandemic is figuring out when and where people contract the virus and so apace tracing their contacts, and then at that place is maybe no identify in the nation where that is equally catchy a task as in Las Vegas, where terminal year guests outnumbered residents by twenty 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 subsequently a 78-day hiatus. An over-the-top water show set to Elvis'due south "Viva Las Vegas" at the Bellagio Hotel marked the occasion, and a marquee sign at the Aria Resort & Casino summed upwards Sin Urban center's new social distancing ethos: "Think dirty thoughts, simply proceed your hands clean."
As Nevada embarks on one of the about epidemiologically complex reopening experiments in the nation, Gov. Steve Sisolak says he is confident that "every precaution possible" has been taken to ensure that the famed resorts tin can both serve guests and protect public health. Dealers and players are separated past Plexiglas, dice are doused in sanitizer later on every throw, and guests, encouraged though not required to wear masks, are field of study to mandatory temperature checks.
"I don't call up yous'll find a safer place than Las Vegas," the governor said during a recent call with reporters. Just he added that he was closely tracking the state's case numbers and would "pull back if it causes any type of problem."
But as the MGM case illustrates, those numbers offer just a partial picture of virus spread, ane that could forestall officials from seeing and acting upon unsafe spikes in real time. Moreover, the state cannot readily identify clusters of cases among employees at a given casino. And while the contact-tracing challenges faced by Las Vegas are farthermost, they highlight larger national systemic problems.
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The resident-focused tallying method used past Nevada is shared by states across the nation, adopted to avoid counting the aforementioned cases multiple times.
The problem with that methodology, experts say, is that information technology tin can obscure whether a venue with super-spreading potential is condign a hot spot, especially in tourist destinations where visitors from around the world gather en masse.
Michael T. Osterholm, the managing director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, said the organization, which assigns the lead investigatory role to officials in a person's state of residence, worked fine for past outbreaks of diseases such as Legionnaires' disease. Simply Covid-nineteen, he said, is dissimilar.
"Here you have not only an event of magnitude, but likewise a long incubation period and the gene of super-spreaders — one person can go into a casino and infect 200 people," he said. "Information technology'due south a real challenge for whatsoever identify with a loftier concentration of visitors, and it needs to be addressed."
A handful of states proceed a separate, public log of cases involving visitors who test positive for the virus within their borders. Florida, habitation to snowbirds and Disney World, is 1. Nevada is not.
"If you are drawing a map, you don't leave out mountains because that would be an incomplete map," said Alberto Moscoso, a spokesman for the Florida Department of Wellness. "It'due south the aforementioned thing here."
Terminal year, 42.v million visitors flocked to Las Vegas. A little over one-5th came from California, while another fifth were foreigners. Only a very pocket-sized percentage of guests on the Strip were from Nevada.
Much depends on Las Vegas'southward power to lure those visitors back: Nevada casinos generated nearly $viii.8 billion in acquirement concluding year, and the state's unemployment climbed to 28 percent during the shutdown, the highest in the nation.
Rebecca Katz, director of the Center for Global Health Scientific discipline and Security at Georgetown Academy, is an communicable diseases good advising the Vatican also as Wynn Resorts, which operates 2 casinos in the city, on reopening risk mitigation. Asked which was more than complicated, she did non hesitate: "Vegas!"
"This is a group of folks working to observe a way to reopen in a way that is rubber, but information technology's really hard," she said. "If I go on a plane and show upwards in Las Vegas, and I go to three restaurants and play cards and go to a pool, at that place's no national arrangement in place to say, 'Hey whoever came into contact with me needs to get tested.'"
Prototype
In the case of the Women of Power Summit at MGM's Mirage, casino executives said the woman who became sick initially felt unwell on the plane only did non immediately realize what was wrong. She gave her oral communication and interacted with guests and staff before telling hotel security she needed to get to a hospital.
After the woman tested positive for the coronavirus, Dr. Fermin Leguen, the acting main health officer for the Southern Nevada Health District, said he notified New York that it had a example involving a woman hospitalized in Nevada, issued a public notice and asked summit organizers to notify attendees.
It is unclear what organizers did with that information or if other participants got sick; Caroline Clarke, primary brand officeholder for Black Enterprise, which hosted the event, declined to comment.
Just John McManus, MGM's general counsel, said that when the resort did its ain contact tracing it found that three senior resort employees who had been in contact with the adult female were infected, two of whom had to be hospitalized.
That cluster was not, withal, readily credible to either health officials or the public, even though it involved Nevada residents.
That is because while local heath districts are capable of tracking cases to certain workplaces — they currently do then for nursing homes, prisons and preschools — the database they employ does not allow officials to sort cases by casino.
"That data might be available inside the history of a case, simply we'd have to go over each case to discover it," Dr. Leguen said.
That is what Dr. Leguen's staff did when asked by The New York Times to provide case totals involving casino employees from the beginning of the outbreak through April 2, to include the two-calendar week incubation menstruation afterwards the governor'south March 18 shutdown order. The answer, he said, was at least 27.
But Dr. Leguen seemed unaware of the three MGM cases linked to the conference presenter's case, incorrectly stating that "none of the hotel employees" in contact with the adult female had developed the coronavirus. He declined to explicate that discrepancy, saying he could not annotate on private cases.
He did, still, note that the district uses the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Covid-19 Case Report Form to collect case information, a grade that does not crave health departments to list a person's employer. Understanding a casino'south role in virus spread is made more difficult by the fact that what happens in Vegas does not necessarily stay there; guests, who on boilerplate spend three to four nights in Las Vegas, might contract the virus at a casino merely get symptomatic only subsequently returning home.
Reopening regulations crave casinos to notify health authorities if they larn of a coronavirus case at their property. But they are under no obligation to follow up with guests later on they go out, and different resorts have adopted different policies.
MGM is providing a contact email and request guests to voluntarily notify the company if they examination positive within 2 weeks of their stay. Just other casinos, including ii endemic past Wynn Resorts, have decided to leave that job to health officials.
Dr. Leguen said that ultimately he relies upon health officials in other states or countries to notify him if a person who visited Las Vegas during the incubation menstruum tests positive subsequently they leave.
Simply understaffed wellness departments can barely keep up with what is happening within their own states. Dr. Leguen received only 17 such out-of-state notifications through Apr 2, according to a spokeswoman, fifty-fifty though past that betoken the virus was raging.
And visitors to Las Vegas tend to mill almost in ways that present a contact tracing nightmare. Nearly three-quarters of visitors to the Strip take chances, according to the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Say-so, hopping non only from table to table but from resort to resort, and more than half of them see shows.
Consider the calibration of Wynn Resorts solitary: On any given day before the shutdown, some 10,000 visitors walked through its doors, where they consumed an average of 34,000 drinks and 17,000 meals amid 19 restaurants.
D. Taylor, the president of Unite Hither, a union representing casino workers, calls the mega-casinos "cruise ships on country."
Epitome
Mariano Mintero, 64, works in housekeeping at the Bellagio, some other MGM property. He was eager to return to work afterward so long without a paycheck, simply was worried, too. In the days post-obit the shutdown, he said, he had heard that several housekeeping employees had contracted the virus.
"I know we are working for a practiced company," Mr. Mintero said, "but I'1000 a little scared."
Both MGM and Wynn Resorts are going beyond Nevada'due south minimum reopening requirements. Wynn required all returning employees to be tested, for instance, while MGM will offer on-site tests to guests who feel unwell. Both said they also would be willing to support making it easier to runway employee cases by casino.
"I'm in favor of anything that gives all of us more information during this catamenia of fourth dimension," Mr. McManus said. "You have to come at this virus from every angle because the last thing we desire is for people to get sick and for us to take to shut downward again. No ane wants to go through this again."
Danielle Ivory contributed reporting.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/08/us/las-vegas-coronavirus-casinos.html
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