Las Vegas Strip Warily Eyes New Deadly Health Crisis

Las Vegas deals with another healthcare risk after recovering from the covid pandemic which shut down Sin City back in 2020.

The Las Vegas Strip has been an entertainment destination for people from all points of the world for decades, which requires visitors to enjoy their activities in close confines.

Whether it's sitting side by side at a blackjack table, standing around a craps table, sitting next to a stranger at a slot machine or maybe at a headliner show, guests at Vegas hotels and casinos can be at risk of contracting infectious diseases. Sin City has already fallen under scrutiny over the past three years for the "tripledemic" of the coronavirus pandemic, respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV, and influenza, as well a scare from Mpox, which was originally called monkeypox.

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Things Get Back to Normal

Las Vegas closed for business in March 2020 to combat the covid-19 outbreak with hotel casinos operated by Caesars Entertainment  (CZR) - Get Free Report, MGM Resorts International  (MGM) - Get Free Report, Wynn Resorts  (WYNN) - Get Free Report and all others shutting their doors until June, when strict masking and social-distancing rules went into effect. Things didn't get back to normal until March 2021.

The social-distancing period saw measures such as plexiglass screens and limits on players at tables for the visitors who were brave enough to make the trip to the casinos. The tripledemic discouraged many potential guests from visiting Las Vegas because of fears they might catch one of the nasty viruses floating around out there.

But by January 2023, the Nevada Hospital Association was reporting that the situation with crowded hospitals almost three years earlier was subsiding with a rapid decline of hospitalizations.

“Nevada continues to experience a rapid decline in the number of persons requiring hospitalization for respiratory viruses, including covid-19, flu, and RSV,” the Nevada Hospital Association said on Jan. 18, the Las Vegas Review-Journal reported.

Latest Culprit Making People Sick

Now, however, we have a new culprit making people sick. Candida Auris, or C. Auris, a drug-resistant fungus that has been labelled a "serious global health threat" by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is spreading, further pushing healthcare resources to the brink. This virus tends to thrive in healthcare settings causing bloodstream infections and even death.

The Nevada Department of Health and Human Services in April 2022 alerted health care providers of outbreaks of the C. Auris fungus in Southern Nevada, the Review-Journal reported, with the earliest cases discovered in August 2021.

Nevada had 384, more than 15%, of the country’s 2,377 cases of C. Auris in 2022, according to the CDC. The agency said 27 states and the District of Columbia have reported cases, with the earliest infections in the U.S. reported in 2013.

More than 1,000 people in Southern Nevada have been infected with the fungus since August 2021, according to the Nevada State Public Health Laboratory at University of Nevada, Reno’s School of Medicine, with about 100 C. Auris patients dying. Remarkably, Northern Nevada has had only one detected case of C. Auris, which was in Reno in 2019.

Almost half, or 500, Southern Nevada cases were clinical cases, such as an invasive infection of the blood, heart or brain. The remaining cases were known as colonization cases with the fungus detected living on a patient's skin but not causing an infection.

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