Coronavirus / COVID-19 Information

Sonya · Apr 9, 2020

Goooood morning, VMB! Not sure if you all saw this that I posted in the "Casino Closures - Employee Impact" thread:

Cosmo is furloughing all employees, effective April 17.

Boyd doing the same, effective April 11.

Stations says they will continue to pay workers through May 15th.

The National Academies of Science says that warm weather is unlikely to stop Coronavirus, as some had suggested.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2020/04/08/coronavirus-unlikely-diminish-with-warm-weather-national-academies-sciences-panel-finds/

A panel convened by the National Academies of Sciences reported to the White House on Tuesday that the novel coronavirus is unlikely to wane substantially with the arrival of summer, though there are many uncertainties remaining.

These findings are in line with previous studies offering hypotheses regarding how the virus may behave in warmer and more humid conditions and is an attempt to help distill the evidence for and against reduced virus transmissibility during warm weather.
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The NAS report states: “There is some evidence to suggest that SARS-CoV-2 may transmit less efficiently in environments with higher ambient temperature and humidity; however, given the lack of host immunity globally, this reduction in transmission efficiency may not lead to a significant reduction in disease spread” without mitigation measures, such as social distancing.
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MGM Resorts Employee Relief Fund Reaches $11M
https://www.cdcgamingreports.com/mgm-resorts-employee-relief-fund-hits-11m-after-donations-from-headliners/

In a video posted to LinkedIn last week, MGM Resorts acting CEO Bill Hornbuckle said he put $100,000 into the fund, as did other company executives. Meanwhile, headliner Bruno Mars, who has a residency at Park MGM on the Strip, donated $1 million, and the foundation established by the late MGM founder Kirk Kerkorian put $2 million into the emergency relief fund.
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The company said entertainers David Copperfield, Jay Leno, Bill Maher, Kathleen Madigan, David Spade, Boyz II Men, Brad Garrett, Carrot Top, Terry Fator, Ray Romano, Jabbawockeez, Shin Lim, Thunder from Down Under, Hans Klok, Australian Bee Gees, Fantasy, and Bill Blumenreich Presents all donated to the fund.

“With donations from this extraordinary line-up of entertainers, commitments from MGM Resorts and its leadership team, our own employees, and a number of other generous contributions, we have already raised approximately $11 million to assist our employees during this time of unprecedented challenges and hardship,” Hornbuckle said.
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NV Indy has an article that might be of interest to people who manage to spend time in Nevada outside of Clark and Washoe Counties. It's about how Humbolt County, up in the north around Winnemucca, ended up with almost as many cases per capita as Clark County.
https://thenevadaindependent.com/article/coronavirus-in-humboldt-how-a-small-rural-county-ended-up-with-the-second-most-cases-per-capita-in-nevada
And it has this fantastic line:

Someone in Las Vegas might go to the grocery store and exercise more caution because the store is filled with strangers; in Winnemucca, strangers are few and far between.
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It's an interesting look at the difference between managing the response to this virus in a big community and a rural one where people assume it "can't happen here". And how the close rural community can be both a blessing and a curse in this response.

But one of the benefits of being a small town is that many of those relationships already exist. For instance, County Manager Dave Mendiola said he tried to go to a hardware store in town over the weekend but left because it was too crowded. He later followed up with the owner personally about it.

“I said, ‘Hey, I just wanted to let you know this happened to me. I went somewhere else. I always do business with you, but I can’t until you put something in place that guarantees that I have safety, and the safety of other people too.’ The owner said,’ ‘You’re right. We need to look a little bit closer,’” Mendiola said. “People know people and if you have somebody that’s in town and they’re very concerned about it, they’re going to say something to each other and they’re going to take it in a friendly way.”
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Another worker at Allegiant Stadium has tested positive.
https://www.fox5vegas.com/coronavirus/second-worker-at-raiders-allegiant-stadium-site-tests-positive-for-covid-19/article_975282be-6ee3-11ea-8794-f3d813b30266.html

The company was notified on April 7, the statement said. They said the person didn't have close contact with other workers per social distancing protocols. They were on site for one week and left on April 2, prior to experiencing symptoms.

Mortenson/McCarthy said the person is in isolation and will not return to work until they are cleared.
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American Gaming Association Request Help in Getting Loans
https://www.cdcgamingreports.com/aga-congressional-members-seek-trumps-help-in-reversing-gaming-omission-from-349b-in-forgivable-loans/

After being ignored by the Small Business Administration over concerns that small gaming companies were precluded from sharing in $349 billion in forgivable Paycheck Protection Program loans, the American Gaming Association Wednesday took the matter up the chain to the White House.

In a letter to President Donald Trump, AGA CEO Bill Miller said the interim regulatory guidelines issued last week by the SBA to help small companies recover from shutdowns due to the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic, “discriminates against these mainstream businesses and, more importantly, the hundreds of thousands of employees who rely on gaming for their livelihood.”
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At a press conference yesterday, Las Vegas Review-Journal White House reporter Debra Saunders asked Trump about the AGA’s letter.
“We’ll take a look at that. It's a great state. We’ll take a look very strongly,” Trump said.

My favorite, John L. Smith, has an op-ed about whether or not it's time to think about bringing back the "In-House Doctor" to large casino resorts.
https://www.cdcgamingreports.com/commentaries/is-it-time-to-create-a-new-in-house-health-care-system-for-mega-resorts/

You would have liked Dr. Joseph Fink. I suppose just about everyone did.

The good doctor, locally famous as the house physician at Caesars Palace, died in December 2011 after nearly 50 years as a Las Vegas resident.

Fink was smart and funny, and did he ever make “house calls.” The fact he made those calls at what was then the grandest hotel-casino this side of Monte Carlo only made his duty more intriguing. He treated stars for Vegas Throat and a whole lot more. He treated regular guests, too, as well as local patients.
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I have been thinking a lot lately about those old-school doctors from Vegas past. In a post-coronavirus pandemic world, I believe the corporate casino executives of Las Vegas will need to substantially rethink their approach to medical and physician care inside the mega-resorts.

Clark County firefighter-paramedics take an endless string of calls to the Strip during the year. Fires stations near the casino corridor are the busiest in the nation. And the professional firefighters are a remarkable group of first responders whether rescuing heart attack victims or reviving dehydrated party animals.

But their skills and mission only go so far.
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That's all for now.

Sonya · Apr 10, 2020

I wanted to start off with a really interesting article I think will not make some of you very happy.

Why Re-open the Las Vegas Strip
https://www.fool.com/investing/2020/04/09/why-re-open-the-las-vegas-strip.aspx

The tagline for the article is:
We should prepare for the possibility that the Las Vegas Strip may be closed up to 6 to 12 months – or longer.

As is the case everywhere else, the question on everybody's mind here in Las Vegas is: When do things start returning to normal? When can we start returning to work, mingle with others at the restaurants and bars and casinos, hit the gym again, and get a proper hair cut?

When does the Las Vegas Strip reopen, and what will it look like when it does?
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The author sees different scenarios for Las Vegas in general and for the tourist-centered Las Vegas Strip

depending on how the next few weeks play out, I don't think it is inconceivable that Las Vegas (ex-Strip) emerges from lockdown by June, assuming adequate testing capability is in place to test our own population. This means that we could see the locals casinos operated by Red Rock Resorts and Boyd Gaming and others open – along with local restaurants, bars and taverns, gyms, and barber shops – with the caveat that we may be staring at additional lockdowns up until the point that a coronavirus vaccine is produced, and that there will likely still be social distancing measures in place regardless.

But what about the Strip?

Before we can talk about when the Strip should reopen, we need to talk about the why the Strip should reopen, and under what conditions.
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And unfortunately, the Las Vegas economy is not going to simply snap back:

People have to want to travel and have the means (income) to travel.

People have to feel safe coming to Las Vegas.

We have to feel safe having people come to Las Vegas.

This means that at minimum: (a) we have to have coronavirus under control here, and (b) we have to be able to vet the visitors that come here. We are a long way from these needs being met; we are not even capable of testing our own population yet. And until we know when these things will happen, it is not reasonable to project a hard opening date with any level of confidence.

We know what the endgame is: Either we have to have a vaccine (12-18 months+), or everybody needs to be exposed to the virus (the less desirable approach). Until that time, it's a strong possibility that we could be staring at intermittent lockdowns.

And if that is the case, you have to start to ask the question: Until we have a vaccine, why open the Strip at all?
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In order to protect our own population and ensure the safety of the visitor in order to encourage visitation, we are likely to see similar travel restrictions erected before Las Vegas is ready to accept visitors en masse. There will be other restrictions in place: Macau reopened with the qualification that all staff and gamblers wear masks at the table; only half of the gaming tables were allowed to be open; each baccarat table was only allowed four players, instead of seven seats and a crowd of onlookers and back-bettors; and casinos would require temperature checks of the guests.

All of these things present barriers to visitation, and barriers to revenue generation.
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I know that many of you reading this are anxious to have the Strip open at the soonest possible date, and some prominent onlookers insist that May 1st is going to be that date. I encourage you to read these headlines, actions, and statements to get a feel for how this situation is being approached from both inside and outside the gaming industry, and push your expectations for an opening date back.

4/2: Caesars Entertainment furloughs 90% of its American workforce

4/2: Disney to furlough non-essential employees April 19, "with no clear indication of when we can restart out businesses."

4/2: Miami mayor Francis Suarez sent President Trump a letter requesting the immediate suspension of flights from international and domestic COVID-19 hotspots to Miami International Airport

4/1: Tokyo 2020 president Yoshiro Mori believes it will be a risk holding the Olympics next summer due to fears coronavirus may still be around. "Postponing the Olympics by only a year has been described as a 'gamble' by the head of the Tokyo organizing committee."

4/1: "Airline traffic has plunged and it probably won't recover any time soon."

4/1: City of Henderson (NV) cancels all events, sports leagues, and recreation programs through the end of May.

3/31: City of Toronto bans all public events until June 30.

3/30: Virginia Governor Ralph Northam issues stay at home order until June 10.

3/30: "The lockdown in the U.K. to stop the coronavirus outbreak could last for up to six months."

At this stage, even the idea that the NFL season will start on time in September is doubtful. With that in mind, why are we so anxious to crowd the Strip before we are ready?
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Here's one thing we all can agree on!

That said, I think this is an excellent opportunity – while the whole planet is closed – to hit the reset button. This means ditching the nickel-and-dime approach to the customer, and taking the opportunity to do away with hidden fees– including resort fees – entirely.
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And a ray of hope for VMBers:

There is an opportunity here to reset and reinvent Las Vegas and fix the mistakes of the past decade, and change our approach to the customer. We do this right – and this starts by not screwing up the coronavirus containment effort locally, and by not forcing the Strip open before we are ready for visitors – and the customer will come back in due time.

And the second message is this: For those of you who don't live here, I promise that when this is over, the Las Vegas you come back to will be better than the one you last visited.
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Now, everyone take a deep breath and let's move on to some other news:

Drivers entering Utah are being told to complete a Coronavirus Declaration Survey Form:
https://www.abc4.com/news/drivers-entering-utah-will-need-to-complete-an-online-travel-declaration-form-starting-friday/

In coordination with the Utah Department of Transportation, Governor Herbert issued an order Thursday requiring everyone who enters Utah by automobile or by truck by a major roadway to complete a travel declaration form.
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The state is using geolocation to target certain areas for the alert:

What areas are going to be alerted?

I-15 at the Arizona border

US-89 north of Kanab

US-491/191 at Monticello

I-70 at the Colorado border

US-40 at the Colorado border

I-80 at the Wyoming border

I-15 at the Idaho border

I-84 at the Idaho border

I-80 at the Nevada border

The entry points listed above have geo-fenced areas so that vehicles entering the state will receive a text message from a federal system, according to Carlos Braceras, Executive Director of the Utah Department of Transportation.
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When the vehicle comes to stop, the driver will be directed to entry.utah.gov to fill out a self-declaration form. The form will ask if the individual was tested for coronavirus, the results of that test, and if they are experiencing symptoms.

It will also require basic information such as a name and where the driver traveled prior to entering Utah. It will ask about anyone traveling with the driver under 18 years of age. The driver will then receive a confirmation email when they have completed the form.

Inbound passengers at Salt Lake International will have to sign the declaration as well.
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El Dorado expect to furlough employees tomorrow:
https://www.cdcgamingreports.com/regional-casino-operator-eldorado-resorts-to-furlough-employees-on-saturday/

In a memo to employees at the company’s three flagship casino-resorts in downtown Reno – home of Eldorado’s corporate headquarters – General Manager Tracy Mimno told the full-time staff they would go on furlough, which the company expects to be “temporary (less than three months).” CDC Gaming Reports was given a copy of the memo.

A company source said Thursday it is excepted similar notices will be distributed at Eldorado’s 23 properties in 11 states. Eldorado has committed last month to workers through Friday.
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The Thunderbirds tweeted that they are going to do an arial show on Saturday at 2:30pm locally.

We are grateful to all front line #COVID19 responders working around the nation! Since we can’t thank these heroes face-to-face, we’re going to show our support from a safe social distance.. with a flyover/salute over Las Vegas, Sat. @ 2:30 PST.

MGM Resorts sent a memo telling shows to prepare for a June 1st opening date;
https://www.reviewjournal.com/entertainment/entertainment-columns/kats/mgm-resorts-resets-shows-to-june-1-cirqueconnect-back-online-2003265/

The company has notified its entertainment partners, including five Cirque du Soleil shows, to prepare for that date to return. It’s not a binding directive, of course, in the changing COVID-19 environment. Nor does the new scheduling factor in plans to open the hotels themselves, or other amenities across the company.
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Survey shows Nevadans support the shut down, don't expect to open May 1st
https://www.nevadacurrent.com/blog/survey-finds-nevadans-support-stay-at-home-order/

Nevadans strongly approve of the “stay at home” order even as they begin to feel the economic strain of business shutdowns, according to a recent survey conducted for the Retail Association of Nevada.

Three out of four people surveyed by Amplify Relations on April 6 said they supported Gov. Steve Sisolak’s order directing people to stay at home.
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When asked how long they expect the shelter-in-place order to be in effect, only a third chose the date April 30. Another third chose May 31. Twelve-percent said they thought the order would last less than a month, 8 percent believed it would last until June 30, 5 percent believed it would last into the summer, 2 percent believed it would last into the fall, and 10 percent said they didn’t know.
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Vox has an interesting analysis of the plans to open the economy again and the problems with those plans.
https://www.vox.com/2020/4/10/21215494/coronavirus-plans-social-distancing-economy-recession-depression-unemployment

All of them then imagine a phase two, which relaxes — but does not end — social distancing while implementing testing and surveillance on a mass scale. This is where you must begin imagining the almost unimaginable.

The CAP and Harvard plans both foresee a digital pandemic surveillance state in which virtually every American downloads an app to their phone that geotracks their movements, so if they come into contact with anyone who later is found to have Covid-19, they can be alerted and a period of social quarantine can begin. Similarly, people would scan QR codes when boarding mass transit or entering other high-risk public areas. And GPS tracking could be used to enforce quarantine on those who test positive with the disease, as is being done in Taiwan.

To state the obvious: The technological and political obstacles are massive. While similar efforts have borne fruit in Singapore and South Korea, the US is a very different country, with a more mistrustful, individualistic culture. Already, polling shows that 70 percent of Republicans, and 46 percent of Democrats, strongly oppose using cellphone data to enforce quarantine orders.
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The alternative to mass surveillance is mass testing. Romer’s proposal is to deploy testing on a scale no one else is contemplating — 22 million tests per day — so that the entire country is being tested every 14 days, and anyone who tests positive can be quickly quarantined. He shows, in a series of useful simulations, that even if the test has a high false-negative rate, the retesting is sufficient to keep the virus contained, and thus the country can return to normalcy rapidly. Of the various plans, this one seems likeliest to permit a true and rapid economic recovery.
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The AEI proposal is the closest thing to a middle path between these plans. It’s more testing, but nothing approaching Romer’s hopes. It’s more contact tracing, but it doesn’t envision an IT-driven panopticon. But precisely for that reason, what it’s really describing is a yo-yo between extreme lockdown and lighter forms of social distancing, continuing until a vaccine is reached.
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Another Vox article explains how these scientific models work. Why they are only as good as the data we feed into them. And how we use them to move forward.
https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2020/4/10/21209961/coronavirus-models-covid-19-limitations-imhe

One way they are trying to answer these questions is through modeling. Specifically, infectious disease models are tools — based on mathematical formulations — that try to game out what’s possible in the future. These models are varied, often confusing to interpret, and are not crystal balls, especially because the ideal data isn’t yet available. But they are a large part of what government leaders use to make decisions, influencing how resources are allocated to health care facilities and how social distancing orders are issued to the public.
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The question of “how will an outbreak progress” is clearly immense. In a common modeling approach called SIR (SIR stands for susceptible, infected, recovered) scientists are trying to figure how many people are susceptible to a disease, how many of them will become infected, and at what rate and where. But then, as more people recover from the disease, and become immune, that decreases the number of those who are susceptible.
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And Washoe County is expected to order that visitors in long term rentals quarantine themselves for 14 days upon arrival.
https://thenevadaindependent.com/article/coronavirus-live-blog-week-five

County health officer Kevin Dick told reporters during a press call on Friday that he planned to issue the directive later today and that it harmonized with state and local messaging asking anyone coming in from out-of-state to shelter in place and avoid public spaces for at least 14 days to help mitigate possible spread of COVID-19.

“That’s the incubation period to make sure they don’t come down with COVID-19 from contacts that they’ve had in other areas that they’ve visited,” he said. “And we’re just re-emphasizing that this applies to the users of short term rentals, and we’re requiring the short term rental property owners to inform guests that they have those requirements.”
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That's all for now. I heard from someone that was upset with one of the articles I posted because it was "politically slanted" and was too hard on the Trump Administration. To be fair, I did include a warning that the article was harsh on the administration, and I made sure that I didn't include any partisan spin to the parts of the article I quoted that I thought would be of interest to people trying to figure out when the casinos were going to open and life might return to some normalcy. I wanted to address this here, generally, in case anyone else felt the same, but didn't contact me about it.

I'm doing my best to provide you with good information to help you understand what is happening and why it's necessary and to some extent, what we can expect to happen next. If an article provides important information, I'm going to have consider the value of the information over whether it will upset people with a political slant, one way or the other. My intention is not to ever make this thread or topic political, but it is inherently political as politicians are the decision makers here. I'll try to be more careful going forwards, but my primary focus is providing information to help everyone understand and figure out where we go from here.

Sonya · Apr 11, 2020

First I wanted to say thank you to anyone here who sent a few bucks to Nevada Independent. They met their fundraising goal and the whole $100,000 was matched by another donor. Hurray for local journalism!

Here we go.

I saw some discussion on social media about an LA Times article about the long term effects of COVID-19, but it's behind a paywall. So, here's a different one on the same topic that some of you might find interesting.
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/04/survivors-severe-covid-19-beating-virus-just-beginning#

COVID-19’s immediate assault on the body is extensive. It targets the lungs, but a lack of oxygen and widespread inflammation can also damage the kidneys, liver, heart, brain, and other organs. Although it’s too early to say what lasting disabilities COVID-19 survivors will face, clues come from studies of severe pneumonia—an infection that inflames the air sacs in the lungs, as COVID-19 does. Some of these infections progress to acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS), in which those sacs fill with fluid. That condition sometimes leads to scarring that can cause long-term breathing problems, Ferrante says, but studies show that most ARDS patients eventually recover their lung function.
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Sports Illustrated has an Op-Ed about when/if sports are coming back.
https://www.si.com/mlb/2020/04/10/sports-arent-coming-back-soon

The proposals multiply almost as fast as the coronavirus: The NHL can play in North Dakota! The NBA can play on a cruise ship! MLB can play in a biodome! The NFL can play in its stadiums, with 70,000 fans packed in!

These are fun thought experiments, at least as good a way to spend time in isolation as watching Tiger King. And everyone wants to believe we will be buying peanuts and Cracker Jack this summer. But fans deserve a reality check: According to the experts—medical experts, not the money-making experts in league offices—we will not have sports any time soon. And when we do, we will not attend the games.
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"We will not have sporting events with fans until we have a vaccine," says Zach Binney, a PhD in epidemiology who wrote his dissertation on injuries in the NFL and now teaches at Emory. Barring a medical miracle, the process of developing and widely distributing a vaccine is likely to take 12 to 18 months.
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Until the vast majority of the population is immune to COVID-19, the disease the virus causes, any gathering as large as an NFL game risks setting off a biological bomb. That may sound like hyperbole, but that's the exact phrase a doctor in Bergamo, Italy’s hardest hit city, used to describe a Feb. 19 soccer match between hometown Atalanta and Spain’s Valencia, which super-charged the virus’s spread.
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Even if we can start this, we almost certainly can’t finish it. Just look at South Korea and Japan, which both believed they had the outbreak under control and have since pushed back the start dates of their professional baseball seasons. In response to ESPN's reporting on the MLB biodome scenario this week, former Medicare and Medicaid head Andy Slavitt tweeted, “I’m as big a sports fan as anybody, but this is reckless. Leagues need to follow the science & do the right thing.”

The leagues know how farfetched their ideas are. So do the players’ unions. They continue to explore options because they would be remiss not to. But fans should understand how unlikely this all is.
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Burning Man has been cancelled for Aug 30-Sept 7th
https://www.billboard.com/articles/news/festivals/9356489/burning-man-2020-canceled-coronavirus

"After much listening, discussion, and careful consideration, we have made the difficult decision not to build Black Rock City in 2020," the statement, posted to the Burning Man Project website, reads in part. "Given the painful reality of COVID-19, one of the greatest global challenges of our lifetimes, we believe this is the right thing to do. Yes, we are heartbroken. We know you are too. In 2020 we need human connection and Immediacy more than ever. But public health and the well-being of our participants, staff, and neighbors in Nevada are our highest priorities."
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And Howard Stutz has an article in CDC Gaming Reports, It's only been a month, and we have a long way to go.
https://www.cdcgamingreports.com/commentaries/its-only-been-a-month-and-we-have-a-long-road-ahead-of-us/

Wynn Resorts and MGM Resorts International became the first companies to close Las Vegas Strip properties. Two days later, Nevada Governor Steve Sisolak said the nation’s largest gaming and tourism market needed to cease operations completely, as a matter of public safety. The move seemed to compel the rest of the gaming industry to follow suit.

What took place nearly a month ago was the right thing to happen.
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The gaming industry will remain closed at least through April. As I wrote this week, casinos might not open until late May, and even when they do, we’re not going to see resorts ramp back up all at once. Social distancing protocols will continue, and casino customers will need to get comfortable again being around large crowds.
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And eventually, when the time comes, casino operators need to reopen their closed venues in a responsible manner.

The next few weeks and months will define the gaming industry’s future.
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A little quiet today. I'll update again on Monday. Have a Happy Easter!

Sonya · Apr 13, 2020

Hope you all had a lovely Easter Weekend at home.

Now for the news:

Shania Twain has postponed her residency, cancelling May and June dates:
https://www.bilEly lboard.com/articles/columns/country/9356589/shania-twain-las-vegas-residency-may-june-canceled-dates

Twain's residency at the Zappos Theater at the Planet Hollywood Resort & Casino is scheduled to resume in August and run through December.
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Sorry I couldn't find a link to embed this on the board, but here is a video of the Thunderbirds flying over the Las Vegas Strip on Saturday.
https://twitter.com/SecAFOfficial/status/1249151384353636353

Nevada Independent has an interesting article about small town life in Nevada and how the towns are handling the situation:
https://thenevadaindependent.com/article/as-covid-19-creeps-into-rural-life-small-towns-reckon-with-the-pandemics-uncertainties
Ely is a small big town, with 4,000 people in it. They have a weekly local paper, but most residents get their news from Salt Lake City channels. They've started a daily radio show on their local station to have the mayor broadcast information.

The modern-day fireside chat is one way rural communities are adjusting to the coronavirus-triggered closures that have upended life in places big and small across the state. In Nevada’s sparsely populated communities, health and economic fears aren’t all that different from those in Reno or Las Vegas. But the closures add an extra wrinkle to daily routines in places where many people know each other by name and rely on that neighborly culture.
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Wendover sees a lot fewer weekend visitors:

It is usually easy to tell when the work week ends and the weekend starts. On some weekends, as many as 20,000 visitors drive to West Wendover (population: about 4,000) to stay at one of its casinos, stock up at a large Lee’s Liquors or visit the marijuana dispensary.

Now, the casinos are closed. They are by far the largest employers in West Wendover. Corona estimated that 78 percent of the population is employed at one of the large casinos that line Wendover Boulevard, where a neon sign of a cowboy named “Wendover Will” greets visitors.
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The Nevada Northern Railway Museum has a plan!

The Nevada Northern Railway received approval this week for a $156,444 loan. Bassett said the money will cover 18 employees’ paychecks — preventing the railway from having to lay off workers who would be tough to replace.

“Quite frankly, where do you find a steam engineer?” he said. “Trying to keep these people as part of the railroad family is incredibly important.”
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The Mizpah Hotel in Tonopah is closed.

As much as the train depot is an institution in Ely, so too is the Mizpah Hotel in Tonopah, which sits about 170 miles to the west. A message appeared on the 112-year-old hotel’s website this week:

“We have made the difficult decision to close our beloved Mizpah Hotel while COVID-19 continues to affect our lives. We will take this time to renovate, clean & update Her and be at the ready when it is safe to do so!”
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Howard Stutz has posted an article with a former gaming regulator, saying there's no reason to block the ElDorado/Caesars deal.
https://www.cdcgamingreports.com/former-nevada-gaming-regulator-no-material-reason-to-block-eldorado-caesars-deal/

Despite the current closure of the nation’s casino industry due to the ongoing COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic, the former chairwoman of Nevada’s Gaming Control Board said she doesn’t see a material reason why regulators would block the $17.3 billion merger between Eldorado Resorts and Caesars Entertainment, “based on publicly available information.”

Becky Harris, who served two years the state’s top gaming regulator, told an investors’ conference call organized last week by SunTrust Humphrey gaming analyst Barry Jonas that the casinos currently operated by the two companies wouldn’t necessarily have to be reopened for regulators to approve the transaction, which was announced 10 months ago.
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He hinted that the FTC could rule on the Eldorado-Caesars deal by the end of April, which would pave the way for the remaining states to sign off on the transaction and allow the deal to close by the end of June.
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Fox5 has a piece about The strengths and weaknesses of Vegas, moving forward:
https://www.fox5vegas.com/coronavirus/the-strengths-and-weaknesses-of-las-vegas-moving-forward/article_527d1248-7c77-11ea-a13b-b700ce817b07.html

He said the most apparent disadvantage is the same reason most people come to Las Vegas in the first place.

"So much of Las Vegas is based on going to some place with large groups of people and doing something in close proximity to others,” he said. “Whether it's gambling, or going to shows, or nightclubs or even out to dinner."
The Las Vegas Raiders were on track to play their first season in Sin City in 2020. Thanks to stadium construction delays due to the coronavirus pandemic, the Raiders may have to wait another year to enter their glamorous new home. Per Vincent Bonsignore of the Las Vegas Review-Journal, the Raiders investigated options to play games in Salt Lake City, Phoenix and San Diego if the coronavirus pandemic and the stay-at-home orders continue construction delays to Allegiant Stadium. This is considered the worst-case scenario for the Raiders as the franchise still plans to have the stadium completed in time.
He said the casinos already do a good job of approaching public safety as a collective issue and this pandemic can't be any different. He said people need to feel confident they can come to Las Vegas without getting sick.
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"The strength of Las Vegas is really more geographic than anything else. It sits in the desert," Kempfer said. "Las Vegas has a built-in advantage in that it's possible to contain Las Vegas - put a heavy screening and testing protocol in place - not just for visitors but also those working in the industry where they will be in contact with visitors to make sure, basically, Las Vegas is safe and that people are testing negative.”

“That doesn't mean you get rid of all the prophylaxis and protocols for masks and everything else, but what it does is it dramatically decreases the chance that someone would catch coronavirus or transmit coronavirus by putting in these layers of protection,” he said.
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Daily Beast has an article about how we can emerge from this virus, to some semblance of normalcy.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/coronavirus-lockdown-will-end-eventually-heres-how-it-might-play-out

Public-health experts surveyed by The Daily Beast said there were three main things authorities need to be able to provide—effectively, affordably, and with quick results—to the American public before it’s safe to send at least some people back to work and into public life. First are millions more diagnostic tests, which can tell if someone currently has COVID-19. Then come antibody tests, which can determine if people recently had it and may have developed enough of the right kind of immune response to offer some protection from illness. Finally, authorities need more robust “contact-tracing” to track who might have been exposed to the virus and prevent them from spreading it further.
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There are other hurdles, too. It’s important to ensure hospitals around the country can handle a surge of cases without resorting to crisis standards of care, provide enough personal protective equipment for all health-care workers who could be exposed to cases, and—as the American Enterprise Institute plan notes—there should be a sustained drop in cases for more than 14 days before any social-distancing guidelines in hot spots are loosened.
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Assuming all these obstacles are overcome, people who are still holding out hope for returning to packed sporting events and boozy brunches are probably going to be disappointed. At least for a while.

Most health experts interviewed for this story agreed on two main points: The loosening of social-distancing measures has to be done slowly and carefully; and public gatherings—like concerts, professional sports, movie theaters, and especially cruises—will be the last to return.
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Based on the progress in Wuhan and in Italy, Americans could be coming out of shelter-in-place in “more than a month but less than four months,” Brewer suggested. To paint a clearer picture for New Yorkers, for example, he said to expect to be back in the office by the end of the summer, by which time Manhattanites might even be able to “throw a small party, depending on your age and demographic—and the age and demographics of the individuals who will be coming.”

The American Enterprise Institute’s plan recommends a phased reopening of businesses with an emphasis on telework, distance learning, and continued personal social distancing, along with an indefinite ban on gatherings of more than 50 people.

Arnold Monto, a professor of epidemiology and global health at the University of Michigan who has advised both the World Health Organization and the Defense Department on communicable diseases, also predicted a gradual reopening. He teased a scenario where people who can work from home keep doing so as long as possible, while others who cannot begin commuting to work. Monto noted there are plenty of jobs deemed “nonessential” that don’t require close contact within six feet, including lawn maintenance and gardening. It would also be smart to keep all non-essential travel on hold, since that was an issue in China, where local transmission was contained until travel between cities brought in new waves of infection, he said.
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“As a public-health professional, I think it would be a good idea to have to show proof-of-test results in order to go to a sporting event or restaurant, but as an individual, it’s a very intrusive idea,” said Redlener. “These are very fundamental struggles that we’re going to have to go through.”

And even with that kind of meticulous testing, people will need to be more careful than ever.

“The common cold is no longer the common cold. If you start getting sick, you need to get tested immediately and rapidly,” he continued. “If they’re negative, they go home and stay home until they’re symptom-free. If they are positive, then we have to do aggressive contact-tracing.”
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“At any moment, one person could start the whole thing over again,” said Haseltine. “That’s why it’s going to be a long time before we can go back to normal. The danger is that we’re going to run out of patience and political will.”
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The NVIndy has been doing a series about local businesses being effected by the virus.
This one is about cancelled weddings, sad brides and wedding photographers trying to hold on.
https://thenevadaindependent.com/article/nevada-interrupted-canceled-weddings-bring-grieving-process-for-brides-financial-uncertainty-for-photographers

Moore is usually busy photographing couples exchanging vows and families gathering to celebrate their loved ones.

Now that attempts to reduce the spread of coronavirus have resulted in non-essential business closures and wedding cancellations, however, she is rescheduling wedding dates and updating her contracts to include a clause for pandemics.

“I’ve been on the phone a lot with clients, either reassuring them or just helping them deal with it,” Moore said. “I’m also back at just general website work, blogging, but there’s only so much you can blog about cooped up at home.”
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As we hear of more construction workers testing positive for Coronavirus, The Raiders have a contingency plan for starting the 2020 season:
https://www.cbssports.com/nfl/news/raiders-reportedly-have-contingency-plan-in-case-stadium-is-not-completed-with-three-cities-at-top-of-list/

The Las Vegas Raiders were on track to play their first season in Sin City in 2020. Thanks to stadium construction delays due to the coronavirus pandemic, the Raiders may have to wait another year to enter their glamorous new home. Per Vincent Bonsignore of the Las Vegas Review-Journal, the Raiders investigated options to play games in Salt Lake City, Phoenix and San Diego if the coronavirus pandemic and the stay-at-home orders continue construction delays to Allegiant Stadium. This is considered the worst-case scenario for the Raiders as the franchise still plans to have the stadium completed in time.
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Here is the LVRJ link on the same story: https://www.reviewjournal.com/sports/raiders/raiders-prepare-for-allegiant-stadium-construction-delays-2005387/

And lastly, one of the journalists I follow on Twitter shared a page from the EPA.

If you are out of your favorite cleaning product and wonder if a replacement product will work to kill the COVID-19 germs, the EPA has a page for that:
https://www.epa.gov/pesticide-registration/list-n-disinfectants-use-against-sars-cov-2

The easiest way to find a product on this list is to enter the first two sets of its EPA registration number into the search bar below.

For example, if EPA Reg. No. 12345-12 is on List N, you can buy EPA Reg. No. 12345-12-2567 and know you’re getting an equivalent product. You can find this number by looking for the EPA Reg. No. on the product label.
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That all for now.

Sonya · Apr 14, 2020

Hello, fellow news-junkies. I'm not sure how much time I have for my news post today. Been hectic on the home front. Mom was in the hospital over the weekend with some kind of uncontrolled fever related to an infection. I think IV antibiotics have got it under control. But getting her home, with nobody to care for her there, has been interesting. I think we've got it handled and she is back at home now. But I've got a lot to share. What I can't get to today, I will be sure to post tomorrow.

The Nevada Independent has and interview with the Director of the Nevada State Public Health Department, talking about testing:
https://thenevadaindependent.com/article/takeaways-from-a-qa-with-the-director-of-the-nevada-state-public-health-lab

With the deployment of Point of Care Machines and an expansion of recent efforts to manufacture collection kits to use in testing for COVID-19, The Nevada Independent once again talked with the director of the Nevada State Public Health Lab, Dr. Mark Pandori, to learn where the state is with its various testing efforts.

Pandori covered the lab’s preparedness and safety, the arrival of new rapid testing machines, the continued efforts to manufacture collection kits and serology testing in the state.
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The state has received 15 testing units called ID Now machines that can produce results in about 15 minutes because they use technology that is more sensitive — and under new FDA guidelines, a doctor’s order is not needed in order to get one.

“These ID Now machines are interesting because under the Emergency Use Authorization, they are waived. So what that means is that you don’t need a doctor or a clinician around to order that test,” said Pandori. “You know, there are state laws that vary from state to state, but overall, the idea here is since it’s waived, you don’t need a licensed individual to order or run the test.”
....
The machines can perform only a limited number of tests, though, because they use new cartridges for every test — and each machine comes with just 8-10 cartridges. The lab expects to get more cartridges as manufacturing ramps up.
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Vincent Lombardi is heading up an effort at the UNR School of Medicine to help get surgical grade resin for 3D printing of parts of the collection kits. Pandori said the medical school has secured enough raw materials to 3D print about 60,000 swabs for the collection kits.

“I don’t expect this rapid testing thing to help out a whole lot, given the shortage of cartridges right now,” Pandori said. “I mean, if they can get us the cartridges quickly, it will certainly help. And I know that the private labs are still ramping up their testing — and with automation, we should be able to ramp up ours. So I have a lot of confidence that whatever’s coming our way we’re gonna meet head on.”
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Right now there is no plan to introduce serology testing, a blood test that detects antibodies and that can determine whether a subject had and recovered from COVID-19.

“There’s a lot of interest in serology right now and the reason for that is because we want to know two things. One is who has been exposed? Because if you’ve been exposed to this virus, you would make antibodies,” said Pandori. “Number two, some people are suggesting that we can use that information to say to people that if you’ve had the infection and you have antibodies that you could report back to work and you know, maybe you’re immune to the virus. I’m only saying that I think right now we don’t know for sure 100 percent that people that are positive on a serology test can’t get COVID-19 again.”
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Ticketmaster has quietly changed its refund policy, and you probably won't like it.
https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2020/04/10/ticketmaster-quietly-changes-refund-policy/

It’s hardly a secret that the coronavirus (COVID-19) crisis has brought the live-event industry to a screeching halt. Responding both to government mandates and health concerns, promoters have canceled (or delayed) sporting events, concerts, and essentially all other audience-based entertainment functions.

And predictably, a substantial number of would-be attendees are looking to receive refunds for the tickets they bought prior to the pandemic. In responding to this unprecedented cluster of repayment requests, Ticketmaster has quietly changed its refund policy to cover only canceled events — not the many functions that promoters have indefinitely “postponed” or rescheduled to a date/time that some ticketholders cannot make.
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The Nevada Indy's Jackie Valley listened to a discussion with LVCVA CEO, Steve Hill. And she tweeted a quote:
"While we are optimistic about the future of Las Vegas, we know that the industry is going to remain closed for some period of time and fiscal year 2021 is going to be difficult."
Also, the agency has identified 80 positions to eliminate and another 270 that it plans to furlough with health benefits intact during that period.

Here is the link to the story on this topic:
https://thenevadaindependent.com/article/tourism-agency-chief-outlines-financial-projections-budget-cuts-amid-covid-19

“The desire to come to Las Vegas has not changed,” he said. “People can’t come right now. But there is still no place like Las Vegas.”
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NV Indy's Riley Snider tweeted about the Governor calling up additional National Guard troops to help out in Nevada:
NV National Guard is activating an additional 700 soldiers and airmen to help with NV's COVID-19 response. Most will he assigned to Las Vegas, duties include "medical support, food bank and warehouse logistics, transportation of supplies, set up of alternate care facilities"

After some political positioning by people in Nevada, the Trump Administration loosened up the SBA Loan Program to cover some smaller casinos
https://www.reviewjournal.com/news/politics-and-government/gaming-business-rule-change-doesnt-mollify-nevada-lawmakers-2006434/
But some in Nevada are still not happy.

On Monday, a colleague posed a follow-up question from the Review-Journal to Mnuchin. The secretary scoffed at the notion that there are “small casinos,” although he recognized that “there are such things as small taverns and restaurants that have literally, you know, small gaming things. And we are coming out with some additional guidance on that.”

The new rule, which was posted Tuesday without an announcement, also caps gaming profits to $1 million for applicants seeking Paycheck Protection Program loans under the CARES Act.

“While these changes represent some progress, they fall woefully short of fully addressing antiquated, discriminatory policies that have, to date, restricted small gaming companies from accessing critical loan support made available through the CARES Act,” AGA President Bill Miller said. “As a result of this half-measure, small gaming businesses that have closed to comply with government orders will continue to be denied access to this critical lifeline to support their employees.”
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Here is the Nevada Independent coverage of the same topic:
https://thenevadaindependent.com/article/sba-allows-small-casinos-to-access-emergency-loans

Casinos with fewer than 500 employees can participate in the Small Business Administration’s Paycheck Protection Program if their gaming revenue last year was less than $1 million and comprised less than half of business revenue, under new SBA guidance.

But the new parameters are unlikely to help many Nevada’s small casinos.

“The way the guidance is structured, the number of Nevada casino-gaming operators that will be able to participate in the Paycheck Protection Program would appear to approach zero,” said Jeremy Aguero, a principal Las Vegas-based Applied Analytics. “There may be a few that qualify, but the criteria are such that the vast majority will remain excluded.
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The Southern Nevada Health District has posted a new map that shows COVID infection rates by zipcode.
http://www.southernnevadahealthdistrict.org/coronavirus

A fourth construction worker at Resorts World has tested positive for Coronavirus.
https://www.cdcgamingreports.com/fourth-construction-worker-at-resorts-world-lv-site-tests-positive-for-covid-19/

Developers of the $4.3 billion Resorts World Las Vegas said Monday a fourth construction worker has tested positive for COVID-19 but stated that work on the Strip project would continue with various safeguards in place.
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My concern is that at some point, someone is going to stop construction if they can't find a way to continue to work in a way that keeps workers safe. Stopping construction is going to slow down and the new shiny things that will draw people back to Vegas, eventually.

And in crazy-town news, the High-Speed Train to Vegas has won California Bond Approval:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-14/high-speed-train-to-las-vegas-wins-california-bond-approval

California has approved $600 million of tax-exempt financing for a proposed high-speed train to Las Vegas, clearing a path for Virgin Trains USA to sell bonds for the private rail project.

A state committee Tuesday voted 3-0 to grant the rail project 15% of the state’s annual private activity bond allotment. Supporters of the train have said its construction and completion, slated for 2023, will result in more jobs, housing development and environmental benefits for the state.
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Southern Nevada announced they plan to use the Convention Center as an emergency overflow hospital, if needed.
https://thenevadaindependent.com/article/coronavirus-live-blog-week-six

“As of today, we are grateful to report that our hospitalization needs do not require the addition of this alternate care site, but we are ready to put this plan into action if we need it,” Clark County Commission Chairwoman Marilyn Kirkpatrick said in a statement. “As a community, our early actions have made a difference in the caseload we are seeing.”

The site, built in a hall that encompasses nearly 1 million square feet, would have spaces for coronavirus patients who need medical attention that is lower than intensive care, as well as space for people without COVID-19 who need post-operative care before being discharged from a hospital.
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This Guardian article, After the end of the world, the eerie silence of the Las Vegas Strip.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/14/las-vegas-strip-closed-coronavirus
It has some wonderful photos of the Strip and Downtown shut down, and great content like this:

In front of Caesars Palace, the fountains were dry and still. A stone-faced Caesar gestured from a pedestal as a lone goose waddled down the street, alongside the few passing cars. Gondolas docked at the entrance to the Venetian on still water the color of toilet bowl cleaner.
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This is the first time the entire strip has been shut down since the JFK assassination; even the devastating mass shooting in 2017 only resulted in a partial closure.

The effects on the local and state economy are expected to be catastrophic. Las Vegas saw 42.5 million visitors in 2019, and the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority estimates that the city hosted 3 million visitors in February alone.
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The economic indicators for the state as a whole, which relies just as heavily on tourism, are devastating: the Nevada Resort Association (NVA) has warned the state has lost an estimated $2bn from cancelled meetings and conventions, and could lead to $39bn in economic losses overall. The NVA says that one in three jobs in Nevada are connected to the tourism industry, responsible for $20bn in annual wages and salaries. “No other state in America depends on travel and tourism at the magnitude Nevada does,” the Association warns.

And so Las Vegas has become one of the most striking places in the United States to be able to see the toll the crisis has taken on fun and leisure.
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Before they closed, the casinos posted goodbye-for-now messages on the digital screens they usually use to welcome guests. They make for a haunting backdrop: “Stay safe, stay strong, we look forward to welcoming you back soon,” from the MGM Grand, and “Doors closed, hearts open” at Palace Station. In a particularly grim twist, many establishments have been using the hashtag #VegasStronger in their signage, since #VegasStrong was already used, in the aftermath of the 2017 shooting. The giant resort hotels behind the casinos are walls of black, every hotel room dark.
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Really, the photos alone are worth a click.

Associated Press has an interview with Dr. Fauci, who says about opening the economy: "We're not there yet."
https://apnews.com/urnublicid:ap.org:46ee40035d500c4190489aea0adb126b

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the government’s top infectious disease expert, said Tuesday the U.S. does not yet have the critical testing and tracing procedures needed to begin reopening the nation’s economy, adding a dose of caution to increasingly optimistic projections from the White House.

“We have to have something in place that is efficient and that we can rely on, and we’re not there yet,” Fauci said in an interview with The Associated Press.
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Fauci said a May 1 target is “a bit overly optimistic” for many areas of the country. Any easing off the strict social-distancing rules in place in much of the country would have to occur on a “rolling” basis, not all at once, he said, reflecting the ways COVID-19 struck different parts of the country at different times.
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Among Fauci’s top concerns: that there will be new outbreaks in locations where social distancing has eased, but public health officials don’t yet have the capabilities to rapidly test for the virus, isolate any new cases and track down everyone that an infected person came into contact with.

“I’ll guarantee you, once you start pulling back there will be infections. It’s how you deal with the infections that’s going count,” Fauci told the AP.

Key is “getting people out of circulation if they get infected, because once you start getting clusters, then you’re really in trouble,” he added.
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Looking ahead, Fauci said a second wave of infection isn’t inevitable. But he added: “if you mean it goes way down and then come September, October, November, we have another peak, I have to say I would not be surprised. I would hope that if and when that occurs, that we jump all over it in a much, much more effective way than we have in these past few months.”
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And I'm going to end this here with a four tweet thread from Governor Sisolak:
Nevada's state-specific plan to phase out the current Stay at Home directives and reopen our economy will be driven by the advice of medical experts to ensure the health and safety of our residents, (1/4)

in addition to the millions of visitors we welcome every year as the premier domestic and international travel destination. (2/4)

I understand that because of Nevada's position as one of the leading tourism hubs in the world, our State has the unique challenge of enacting the highest safety standards possible. (3/4)

I view this challenge as a great opportunity & will work w/ my fellow Western regional Governors, leaders from around the country, & local governments across Nevada to ensure our residents & future visitors know there is a strong plan in place when we reopen for business. (4/4)

Thanks everybody! Hope you are doing well, safe and secure at home. It's a long slog, but we're doing great. Keep on washing your hands! And remember to be kind to each other. We're all struggling and doing the best we can with what we've got. We're scared, we're bored, we're annoyed, we're feeling uncertain. Nothing in this news update helps with any of that, unfortunately, but we are managing to keep the caseload down to a manageable level and not completely overwhelming the health care system. I'm going to take that as a win.

Sonya · Apr 15, 2020

I wanted to address some misinformation I'm seeing out there from various sources. Please be careful with your sources.

First, COVID-19 does not mean this is the 19th iteration of this virus. It stands for COronaVIrusDisease 2019.

No, chlorine in the pool is not going to "keep you safe" in a pool party. It is aerosolized virus in sneezes, coughs, and even breath from a person standing near enough to you for those vaporized virus particles getting into your mouth, nose or eyes, either by entering in the air, or being transferred when you touch something with the virus on it and then touch your face.

Also, this is not "just another flu". It is much more contagious, much more damaging, and spreads faster than any flu virus we are familiar with.

There was a good article in the WSJ on this subject, but it's behind a paywall, so I haven't shared it yet.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-doesnt-flu-tank-economy-like-covid-19-11586511000

Here is a screengrab from the article.

The article goes on to compare H1N1 (2009 Swine Flu) and COVID-19. It took a year to get to the number of deaths from H1N1 and we passed in less than 6 weeks with COVID.

We still have no indication from the Governor when he is even starting to think about reopening Vegas, and even less information about when they would open casinos for tourism. I am sure everyone is aware that this is causing a lot of problems for the economy. But we need to balance that against human lives.

So, where is Nevada right now? I love the weekly graphics and looks at the numbers that Megan Messerly puts together for the NV Indy.
https://thenevadaindependent.com/article/coronavirus-contextualized-3rd-edition-exploring-through-data-covid-19-in-nevada-and-beyond

It has now been a month and a half since Nevada's first case of the novel coronavirus was announced and nearly a month since non-essential businesses were shuttered. Local health officials in Clark and Washoe counties have, in the last week, suggested social distancing measures are working and that the epidemiological curve may be flattening. However, other public health experts have continued to urge caution when looking at the data, which they say likely lags significantly and still does not represent the totality of the situation in Nevada.
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More than 3,100 people in Nevada, a state of about 3 million people, have tested positive for COVID-19. That's about 100 positives per 100,000 residents, or about 0.1 percent. However, because testing remains limited in the state, we probably still don't have the full picture.
"I will say the good news is the picture is getting a little clearer as time goes on because the data is getting better," said John Packham, associate dean for the Office of Statewide Initiatives at the UNR School of Medicine.
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Best case scenario, we would be able to track exactly how many new infections are occurring day by day. However, Labus noted it can take up to two weeks after being infected for someone start showing symptoms of COVID-19, it might be another week before that person is able to get tested — if he or she is able to get tested at all — and more days still for those test results to come back positive and also get reported publicly. That makes it difficult for public health experts to look at the numbers reported today and draw any substantive conclusions about how quickly the virus is spreading within the community.
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There were 1,108 new cases reported during the last full week for which we have data, according to county-reported totals, representing a 50 percent increase over the prior week's total, 739 new cases.
The week before that saw a 121 percent increase, and the week before that a 323 percent increase.
There is one more day left in the current week, but there have been 867 new cases so far, or a 21 percent decrease from last week.
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The question, then, continues to be when will Nevada hit the peak of the epidemiological curve, and when can life begin to return to normal? The University of Washington School of Medicine's Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation projects that Nevada already hit peak resource use on April 8 — moved up from April 18 last week, and peak deaths on April 7, up from April 20. Another model, produced by Covid Act Now, projects Nevada's hospitals will never be overloaded based on current trends, but could be overloaded on May 2 if restrictions are lifted.
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In the meantime, state and local officials are continuing to remind Nevadans to practice social distancing and stay at home. The "flatter" the epidemiological curve, the more spread out the cases are which, in turn, reduces the demand on Nevada's health care system and increases the chances of saving lives.
"This is the challenge, to get people to understand epidemiology and how it works. We can look at the data and say, 'Here’s what we have,' but all of those data points come with an asterisk. They’re limited. They don’t tell you what people think they tell you," Labus said. "If I stopped all disease transmission today, we would see reports coming in for a month."
For the latest on what officials are recommending to flatten the curve, visit the Nevada Health Response website at https://nvhealthresponse.nv.gov/
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Not exactly clear enough to give us an opening date for sure, but there are some good indications. The curve is flattened and with current conditions (including shut down) Nevada is not expected to overwhelm the hospitals with Covid patients. That could change if the stay at home order is lifted too soon, which is why there is so much caution about it.

The biggest problems seem to be rooted around the lack of solid data. Our country is not doing nearly enough testing. There are many problems around testing, and I've linked to articles about that before. There are some hopeful things on the near horizon, like a test that takes 15 minutes for results and doesn't require the swabs that are in short supply. Unfortunately, these test kits (featured at a press conference in the Rose Garden last week) only come with 8-10 test cartridges and many MANY more are needed, but there are problems getting enough of them shipped right now.

We also don't have clear answers about how many people are dying of this virus. With not every infected person being able to get tested, some people are being labeled as "presumed positive", which is not the same as "positive". Different agencies are counting deaths in different ways. That skews the data and can make a lot of it unreliable and hard to compare across different agencies or regions.

The other issue is there are people dying at home of COVID-19, but because they aren't tested, some are being labeled as death from heart attack, ILI (influenza like illnesses),

This ProPublica article gives a pretty good overview of the problem.
https://www.propublica.org/article/theres-been-a-spike-in-people-dying-at-home-in-several-cities-that-suggests-coronavirus-deaths-are-higher-than-reported

In recent weeks, residents outside Boston have died at home much more often than usual. In Detroit, authorities are responding to nearly four times the number of reports of dead bodies. And in New York, city officials are recording more than 200 home deaths per day — a nearly sixfold increase from recent years.
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Experts say it’s possible that some of the jump in at-home death stems from people infected by the virus who either didn’t seek treatment or did but were instructed to shelter in place, and that the undercount is exacerbated by lack of comprehensive testing. It’s also possible that the increase in at-home deaths reflects people dying from other ailments like heart attacks because they couldn’t get to a hospital or refused to go, fearful they’d contract COVID-19.
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Mark Hayward, a sociology professor at the University of Texas-Austin who’s an expert on mortality statistics, said all of those deaths are part of the “overall burden of the pandemic.” He said an uptick in deaths, specifically in ProPublica’s findings for Massachusetts and Detroit, indicates an undercount is occurring.

You should think about the official coronavirus death counts, he said, “as just the tip of the iceberg.” The quality of the deaths data will improve as testing expands and fewer people die without getting tested, he added.

The reason having accurate death statistics is important is because they help signal the location of hot spots and prompt officials to deploy resources. Knowing someone died of COVID-19 also enables health officials to alert their contacts so they can quarantine themselves.
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New York City was among the first to provide data on at-home deaths. Officials said last week that roughly 200 residents were dying each day outside of hospitals and nursing homes. That’s compared with about 35 per day on average between 2013 and 2017, according to city records.
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In Middlesex, Massachusetts’s most populous county and home to Cambridge, Somerville and Lowell, officials reported 317 at-home deaths in March. That’s about a 20% increase from the same time period for the past three years, in which deaths ranged from 249 to 265.
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But there is good news out there. There is a new test that got approval from the FDA this week. It's a spit test, where you spit several times into a small container and return it to the testing employee. This replaces the nasal swabs they have been doing, which also helps prevent the spread because people tend to sneeze after the nasal swab, spraying virus in the process.
https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/fda-clears-first-saliva-test-diagnose-coronavirus-n1183031

Rutgers University researchers have received U.S. government clearance for the first saliva test to help diagnose COVID-19, a new approach that could help expand testing options and reduce risks of infection for health care workers.

The Food and Drug Administration authorized the test under its emergency powers to quickly clear new tests and therapies to fight the outbreak, the New Jersey university said Monday. The test initially will be available through hospitals and clinics affiliated with the school. The announcement comes as communities across the U.S. continue to struggle with testing to help track and contain the coronavirus.
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In its authorization letter to Rutgers, the FDA said the test should only be performed “in a health care setting under the supervision of a trained health care provider.” The FDA has not cleared any COVID-19 tests for use at home, though several companies have announced plans to make them available.

Additionally, the FDA said patients who test negative with the saliva-based kit should have their results confirmed with a second testing method.
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Hopefully this will turn out to be an effective test and the FDA can be persuaded to allow other companies to make this available for wider, and possibly home-based, testing.

The Trump Administration has a plan for reopening the country's businesses. You can read and/or download the plan at this link:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/context/focus-on-the-future-going-to-work-for-america/89ccccbc-7bf0-48d3-8f0c-275494a3b009/?itid=lk_interstitial_manual_7
The plan seems a little light on details, compared to some other speculations on how to proceed that I've read, but there is some information that can give us some guidelines to watch for.

Communities will be differentiated based on the indicators and type of mitigation needed. ·

Low Mitigation – communities where significant spread was never observed, can “re-open” soon

Moderate Mitigation – former hot spots entering controlled recovery, limited mitigation communities observing increased, but contained transmission

Significant Mitigation – current or emerging hot spots, moderate mitigation communities showing signs of strained capacity

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This framework recognizes that the reopening will entail a significant risk of resurgence of the virus. Reopening is therefore conditioned on:

confidence that incidence of infection is genuinely low

a surveillance system that is well functioning and capable of promptly detecting any increase in incidence

a public health system that is reacting robustly to all cases of COVID-19 and has surge capacity to react to an increase in incidence

a health system has the capacity in all respects, including inpatient beds, staffing, an other services, to handle all cases and that is in a position to rapidly scale up to deal with a surge in cases.

Decisions on reopening and, alternatively, on intensifying mitigation will be made at the local and state level with guidance and support from the Federal level.
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One of the things to be prepared for, as outlined in the plan, is the need to loosen and possibly re-tighten restrictions as the cases increase/decrease.

Stepwise loosening of mitigation will result in increased community spread, daily monitoring of indicators over time will be required until the end of the pandemic.

Tightening of mitigation measures will be needed if signs of increased transmission create strain to the public health or health system capacity are detected. When indicators signal a return to sufficient public health and health system capacity, mitigation measures can again be loosened.
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This op-ed, featuring some research from Yale School of Medicine, talks about what they believe we need to be doing now in order to reopen the country.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2020/04/14/coronavirus-aggressive-testing-before-economy-reopens-column/2978684001/

...President Donald Trump has suggested that widespread testing might not even be a necessary step on the way toward opening up the economy. We disagree strongly. Our ability to test individuals will improve drastically in the coming weeks thanks to recent FDA-approved test kits entering large-scale production. Getting the outbreak under control is an absolute necessity before we can move back to a new normal. Now is the time to plan for deploying these tests to gain control of this outbreak.

To date, tests have been used to ensure the appropriate allocation of hospital resources to those critically ill while monitoring health care workers to ensure their safety. Most other tests have been conducted on patients with active and/or progressive symptoms suggestive of COVID-19, or on contact exposures in order to prevent further transmission. These activities must continue for individual isolation and treatment decisions, but now is the time to deploy testing for public health.
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The most important goal is to maximize the detection of symptomatic and asymptomatic infected individuals. Asymptomatic (including pre-symptomatic) people have the highest likelihood of further spreading the disease. Once identified, we can isolate them from potential contacts, including the most vulnerable among us.
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Other sentinel testing opportunities are destinations that remain popular, even among those “staying at home” — including grocery stores, gas stations and pharmacies. Targeted screening like this must be agile. There are many more possible testing sites than can be staffed on any given day in this approach, so testing must be highly mobile (for instance, in tents set up in the parking lot by the entrance or exit).

We must make symptomatic testing much more widely available by expanding drive-thru clinics so that anyone with symptoms remotely suggestive of COVID-19 can be tested, rather than the highly restricted symptomatic testing available now. This is consistent with the goal of finding as many previously undetected infections as possible.
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Finding the majority of infected individuals and isolating them effectively is not merely a Band-Aid. Research shows that detecting and isolating a large majority of infected people within five to 10 days after becoming infected would end this outbreak. Absent a vaccine or reliable therapeutic treatments to lessen the consequences of COVID-19, aggressive community screening and concomitant isolation of those found infected offer our best and perhaps only hope of ending this outbreak without destroying the economy, the health care system, the public’s confidence and/or many thousand lives.

We have only a few weeks until the new tests arrive to plan the logistics and execution of this model. The time to build this system is now, so we can launch it, immediately, once the new tests are in hand. Everything remains at stake until we address this operational issue.
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This article uses the Port of Los Angeles as an example of how the rest of the country might proceed to open for business. Spoiler: It isn't going to be fast or easy.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/04/14/economy-reopenings/

“Everyone is wearing their mask. Everyone is keeping their distance,” said Williams, a driver for Shippers Transport Express for 13 years. “It’s too early to call it normal. The work is there, but you see a lot of concern. Not exactly panic, but concern.”

The situation at the Port of Los Angeles is a case study of what’s ahead for the rest of the country when it’s eventually time to try to reopen. Restarting a business in this pandemic isn’t going to be easy. Businesses can’t just rehire everyone they laid off and return to 100 percent. It’s more akin to a rehabilitation process where business begins somewhere around 50 percent, economists say. From there, it depends on safety and customer demand.
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Opening up the economy is likely to happen in waves. Some sectors such as construction and manufacturing are likely to restart faster than restaurants, hair salons and concerts that involve more human contact and will need time to sort out safety measures. For months to come, business efficiency will be sacrificed by putting in place necessary health measures.Nearly all economists agree that widespread testing or some sort of vaccine will be necessary to truly get the economy back to normal levels, so people can feel safe to go out to restaurants, concerts and baseball games, as consumers rev up the nation’s economic engine, as they did before.

“Testing needs to pick up. That will allow us to keep the spread of the virus down by finding carriers,” wrote Neil Dutta, head of U.S. economics at Renaissance Macro Research, in a note to clients. “We can’t open the economy if every person that gets the virus is still spreading it to five people."
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But before a vaccine is found, expect a transition period. The government is likely to give its blessing for firms to try opening up if they take serious preventive measures, similar to what many grocery stores are doing by limiting the number of people in the store.

This zombie — or limbo — economy is what the Port of Los Angeles is currently living through. Some ships are back, but not all. Some workers are back, but not all. New procedures are in place, especially for how to tie cargo down in a world of social distancing. And a Navy hospital ship, the USNS Mercy, is currently docked in the port, a reminder of just how far from normal everything is.
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Many economists agree with Seroka that it will be a long time before the nearly 17 million Americans who have lost their jobs or seen dramatic cutbacks in hours are all back at work. The latest National Association for Business Economics survey of leading economists released Monday predicts the official unemployment rate will hit 12 percent this spring and fall only to 9.5 percent by the end of the year. That means many months without work for millions of Americans.
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The bottom line in all these "when will we be back to normal" articles seems to hinge on wider testing, people who are sick quarantining themselves, and a very slow reopening, so not to spike cases and overwhelm hospitals again.

Here is another about the lingering need for social distancing, even as we try to open up more businesses.
https://www.statnews.com/2020/04/14/some-social-distancing-may-be-needed-into-2022-to-keep-coronavirus-in-check-new-study-says/

A modeling study on the new coronavirus warns that intermittent periods of social distancing may need to persist into 2022 in the United States to keep the surge of people severely sickened by Covid-19 from overwhelming the health care system.

The research, published Tuesday in the journal Science, looked at a range of scenarios for how the SARS-CoV-2 virus will spread over the next five years. Those scenarios included variables like whether people who are infected develop short-term immunity — less than a year — or longer-term protection. But, overall, the research concludes it is unlikely that life will return any time soon to the way it was before the virus’ emergence.
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The authors suggest a number of factors will play a major role in the path the disease will take over the coming years — if transmission subsides in summer and resurges in winter, if there is some immunity induced by infection and how long it lasts, and whether people get any cross-protective immunity from having been infected with related human coronaviruses that cause common colds.
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Okay, this part is important, although a little difficult for a layman to follow.

In terms of the latter, they suggest if infection with the human coronaviruses, HKU1 and OC43, gives some protection again SARS-CoV-2, it could appear that transmission of the new virus was tapering off. But a return within a few years would be expected, perhaps by 2024, they suggested. The two human coronaviruses induce only short-term immunity — less than a year — in infected people.

If SARS-CoV-2 triggers immunity of a similarly transient nature, annual wintertime waves of infection might be expected, they said. If the immunity lasts longer, the time between surges of cases might be a couple of years, or more.

And if immunity is permanent, the pandemic might burn itself out by about 2025, they said. The researchers suggested, though, that that scenario is unlikely.

The model predicts that a one-time social distancing effort of the type currently being employed in most parts of the country will not stop transmission of the virus. If treatments are developed that can prevent Covid-19 patients from progressing to severe disease or if a vaccine is developed, movement restrictions could be loosened without health care capacity being overwhelmed, the researchers said.
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Infectious diseases epidemiologist Caitlin Rivers said the modeling work will be useful for public health officials and disease experts trying to plan for the continued response to the virus.

“What this is saying is that SARS-CoV-2 will stay with us through 2022, that it’s not going to die down to nothing in the summer. So I think it’s helpful for thinking what interventions are sustainable and effective,” said Rivers, an assistant professor of epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. “If we knew that we only had to make it through another two weeks, we might make different decisions than understanding that this is a threat that will be with us for many months,” she added.

While acknowledging that intermittent periods of distancing over several years “is obviously a very long time,’’ Lipsitch said loosened restrictions could come sooner if scientists discovered that a lot more people have been infected already and have some immunity. He and his co-authors stressed how critical it is to conduct long-term serology studies designed to map out human immune responses to the virus over time.

“On the other hand, there are some indications coming out at the moment that not every case of Covid-19 infection … generates a robust immune response, which would mean that the build up of herd immunity is slower than its anticipated here,” he added.
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Here is another piece from BuzzFeed, from April 1st, about How Long Will Social Distancing Last:
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/danvergano/coronavirus-distancing-new-normal

“We are probably looking at five- to six-month phases, done in different ways and times in different places across the country,” pandemic expert Irwin Redlener of the Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health told BuzzFeed News. “Putting people through that process will be extremely difficult.”
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A recent spate of think tank reports and scientific presentations expand the Imperial College scientists’ vision, suggesting that cities, counties, and towns will need to enact public health lockdowns of varying lengths, with stops and starts based on if and when coronavirus cases hint at rising again.

This cyclical approach to social distancing in order to limit COVID-19 deaths depends on measures such as intensive care unit availability and cases dropping for two weeks or longer. To work — limiting the US death toll to hundreds of thousands of lives lost instead of millions — they demand widespread, fast, and accurate tests; a fortified health care system; and public health officials having the breathing room to track down and isolate new cases before they can spread. Most of all, they require endurance from people nationwide, along with the kind of financial assistance typically delivered to victims of natural disasters rather than economic downturns, noted Redlener, to help as unemployment surges to record heights.

“Once you are doing it, you have to have the patience to see it through,” University of Michigan pandemic historian Howard Markel, who's widely credited with coining the phrase “flatten the curve,” said at a National Academy of Medicine briefing on social distancing last week. “If you pull the trigger off too early, not only will the circulating virus do what it naturally does, but all the economic and social disruptions are for nothing.”
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“We are not a small town. We are a big country, and it has allowed transmission to continue to a point where most cases are undetected, even now,” Harvard pandemic modeler Marc Lipsitch said at the National Academy of Medicine meeting. “So what we can do is social distancing.”

Without social distancing, the Imperial College London report foresaw 2.2 million US deaths from the coronavirus, a number that Trump referenced on Monday in explaining why he extended federal social distancing guidelines. He added that keeping US deaths an order of magnitude lower — still reaching an estimated 100,000 to 240,000 deaths — was the goal of the effort. “Every citizen, family, and business has a role to play in stopping this virus,” said Trump.
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Seasonality remains a mystery, said Osterholm, suggesting that as long as 40% to 80% of the public still has no immunity to the new virus, it will likely readily spread regardless. “At this point, I don’t have a clue what is going to happen to the virus,” he said.

The alternative to one-shot social distancing, contemplated by the Imperial College London study and the plan from Gottlieb, is an alternating cycle of tighter and looser restrictions until we have treatment or vaccine options.
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The goal of this is to allow infections to grow at a manageable rate that doesn’t lead to overwhelmed hospitals, while herd immunity to the virus slowly grows in the larger population. A wild card in this will be cases that are imported as travel restrictions ease up, something China is struggling with now.
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“Just sheltering forever in our homes is not likely,” Nicholas Christakis of Yale’s Human Nature Lab, said on a JAMA podcast on Tuesday. Some states, like Kentucky, which instituted restrictions early, might end them sooner than states like next-door neighbor Tennessee, which waited until longer and has seen higher case counts. “We need to figure out how we are going to live in a time of plague.”
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“We are going to learn a lot of lessons here about ourselves,” he said. “I’m hoping we come out of this a stronger, more resilient people.”
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This article from The Atlantic is a good overview about how we've been playing "whack a mole" so far with this virus. He's critical of Trump, so be warned, if you're a supporter.
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/04/pandemic-summer-coronavirus-reopening-back-normal/609940/

As I wrote last month, the only viable endgame is to play whack-a-mole with the coronavirus, suppressing it until a vaccine can be produced. With luck, that will take 18 to 24 months. During that time, new outbreaks will probably arise. Much about that period is unclear, but the dozens of experts whom I have interviewed agree that life as most people knew it cannot fully return. “I think people haven’t understood that this isn’t about the next couple of weeks,” said Michael Osterholm, an infectious-disease epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota. “This is about the next two years.”

The pandemic is not a hurricane or a wildfire. It is not comparable to Pearl Harbor or 9/11. Such disasters are confined in time and space. The SARS-CoV-2 virus will linger through the year and across the world. “Everyone wants to know when this will end,” said Devi Sridhar, a public-health expert at the University of Edinburgh. “That’s not the right question. The right question is: How do we continue?”
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A lockdown is a measure of last resort, to be used only when a virus is spreading so rapidly that it cannot be controlled through other means. Having deployed that measure, albeit unevenly, the U.S. has now bought itself some time. It can use that time to address its lack of tests and medical supplies, and find less economically devastating ways of controlling COVID-19. When sufficiently braced, states could begin lifting their sweeping restrictions and focus on finding and helping people who are actually infected. But the conditions for making that switch are not clear. “We’ve never faced a pandemic like this before in modern times, so we’re going to have to be flexible,” said Caitlin Rivers of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. “There’s no real playbook.”
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Absent any certainty, one group of health experts, led by Ezekiel Emanuel, an oncologist and former adviser to the Obama administration, argues that stay-at-home orders must continue until at least May 20. Another team, led by Scott Gottlieb, a former FDA commissioner, suggests that states should relax their restrictions only after new case counts have fallen for 14 consecutive days. Currently, the U.S. is still averaging about 30,000 new confirmed cases every day. “My sense is that we haven’t turned the corner,” said Rivers, who is a co-author on Gottlieb’s road map.

Both groups agree that before relaxing the guidelines on social distancing the U.S. urgently needs to expand its ability to test for the virus, and to shore up hospitals with sufficient supplies. These recommendations are sensible, but they hinge on the expectation that the U.S. can recover the ground it lost due to its early inaction. It might not be able to.
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There’s good reason to reopen the U.S. slowly and methodically. When the pandemic first hit, a wide range of social-distancing measures—closing offices, shutting schools, banning mass gatherings, implementing stay-at-home orders—were rolled out in a sudden panic. The rushed deployment was necessary, but made it hard to know which measures actually mattered. The next few months offer opportunities to find out. Communities could relax restrictions gradually, and see if the virus remains at a simmer or returns to a boil. When the virus returns, political leaders should be able to make more informed decisions about which levers to flip. “We should absolutely be throwing everything we can to figure that out,” said Jessica Metcalf, an infectious-disease ecologist at Princeton.
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Once the U.S. gets better at tracking the coronavirus, it could use social distancing more flexibly and precisely. COVID-19 counts could feature on the nightly weather report, said Stephen Kissler, an infectious-disease modeler at Harvard. “In the same way that cities issue evacuation orders a few days before a hurricane hits, they could issue distancing orders a few days before we reach the threshold that would threaten to overwhelm our ICUs,” he added.

There’s a risk in trying to be too clever, though. Dylan Morris of Princeton, who also models infectious diseases, notes that exponentially growing epidemics are not just harder, but riskier, to control. Slight delays in action can have huge consequences, as the United Kingdom learned last month. Relying too heavily on models, the British government believed that it could precisely control the spread of COVID-19 by rolling out social restrictions at carefully chosen moments. Its hubris led to a substantial spike in cases. Now that the U.S. is slowing the pandemic, gently easing back on social distancing would be safer, Morris argues, than snapping back to business as usual when small missteps could be catastrophic. “If we’re judicious about how we lift restrictions, we might never have to go back into lockdown,” he said.
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The lifting of some restrictions, even with added social distancing, could come with some difficulties:

This process might take several weeks to unfold, and even at the end of it, none of the experts I spoke with was comfortable with the return of crowded public spaces. Gottlieb’s road map, for example, recommends that until a vaccine or an effective treatment is produced, social gatherings should be limited to 50 people or fewer. That will be especially challenging in large cities: An average Manhattan street or subway car is the equivalent of a mass gathering. Elsewhere, concerts, conferences, summer camps, political rallies, large weddings, and major sporting events may all have to be suspended for at least this year. “It’s hard for me to imagine anyone going to Fenway Park and sitting with 30,000 fans—that will almost surely be a bad idea,” said Ashish Jha, an internist and public-health expert at Harvard. “This isn’t going to look like a normal summer in America.”
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Over the coming months, we need “to normalize COVID in the public psyche, and reinforce that this will be a part of our day-to-day lives,” said Kissler, the Harvard disease modeler. “Many people I've spoken with are aghast at the thought. We thirst for a swift and decisive 'victory.' But I'm reminded of images from World War II as people in London walked to work, briefcases in hand, against a backdrop of bombed-out buildings. I think we are in store for a similar period in history, as we learn to make greater peace with the world's chaos and our own mortality.”
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As the rest of the U.S. comes to terms with the same restless impermanence, it must abandon the question When do we go back to normal? That outlook ignores the immense disparities in what different Americans experience as normal... It glosses over the ongoing nature of the coronavirus threat. There is no going back. The only way out is through—past a turbulent spring, across an unusual summer, and into an unsettled year beyond.
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The only way out is through.

It's not ideal and it's frustrating to everyone. Governor Sisolak doesn't want the casinos closed. He knows where his state gets its money. But he also doesn't want to be the Governor who threw open the doors and people from all over the world flock to Vegas, to get Coronavirus, bring it back home and create further sickness and death. The casinos want to be open, but they also don't want to kill their customer base. I promise you that as soon as experts and epidemiologists say it's safe, they will work as quickly as possible to get you back, giving them your money.

I'm in an usual situation, where I am probably not going to be able to go back until their is a vaccine. I'm at very high risk with my health issues and not being as young as I once was, dammit. I don't like it. It doesn't make me happy to have to think about cancelling the trips I had planned for later in the year. Or to cancel my "reward" trip to River Rock in BC, Canada for doing the surgery I wasn't looking forward to. I want to be hanging out with my friends and having a good time like we always did before. Will that ever happen again? I don't know. I sure hope so. But I'm not willing to risk my life to find out if that is going to be in May, or July, or September, or December or.....

I know how difficult this is, but I hope you can all keep things in a bigger perspective. We are trying to keep the numbers as low as we can now to avoid overloading the hospitals. So far, we've done a decent job, overall. We could be better, but we could be a lot worse. We just need to be patient. This is a once in a lifetime pandemic. It isn't "the flu". It's not even something like SARS or H1N1 that we've experienced in recent years. This is a killer and it spreads rapidly, from people who aren't even showing symptoms. Maybe I'm a Pollyanna, but I think lives are more important than money and convenience. I would hate to lose any of you to this, because you couldn't wait to get back to Vegas. I'd rather we all take a deep breath, wait for the scientists to tell us when it's safe, and proceed as they instruct us to protect ourselves and allow many, many more Vegas trips in the future.

Be well, my friends.

Sonya · Apr 15, 2020

Rats. I was sure I posted this here, but now I can't find it. So, apologies if this is a repeat.

Governor: Nevada nowhere close to easing virus restrictions
https://apnews.com/3cd27ea04c51767e41fcb3cf472da1ad

Nevada Gov. Steve Sisolak said the state is nowhere near ready to begin reopening parts of its shuttered economy due to the coronavirus and is working to address a deluge of residents trying to get unemployment benefits.

The Democratic governor said in a Tuesday night news conference that he doesn’t have specific benchmarks he’d like to see before considering easing closures. He said he will rely on doctors who have been advising him about the pandemic while considering factors such as rates of infection and deaths, the impacts on hospitals and input from business. But he said he didn’t want to give anyone the idea that discussions about easing restrictions and reopening are happening anytime soon.
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Sonya · Apr 16, 2020

Here is today's update.

Someone contacted me and asked me to include Mayor Goodman's comments on the shut down.
https://news3lv.com/news/local/las-vegas-mayor-open-our-city-being-closed-is-killing-us

“This shutdown has become one of total insanity,” Mayor Carolyn Goodman said the day after Nevada Gov. Steve Sisolak declared he was nowhere near reopening parts of the state’s idled economy.

“I am asking: Open the city. Open Clark County. Open the state,” said Goodman, reading a statement at the start of weekly City Council meeting convened amid social distancing advisories aimed at keeping groups of people from spreading the contagious virus.
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And here is coverage from The Las Vegas Sun:
https://lasvegassun.com/news/2020/apr/15/mayor-goodman-virus-deaths-dont-warrant-economic-s/

Las Vegas Mayor Carolyn Goodman again implored the governor to allow businesses to reopen amid the coronavirus pandemic, saying today the shutdown is “killing” the economy.

Goodman, who earlier compared the virus to the common flu, also questioned whether there was data to support the shutdown and downplayed the number of virus-related deaths.

Goodman expressed condolences over the 130 coronavirus deaths in Nevada, but she emphasized the patients died from complications attributed “in part” to COVID-19. The number of deaths should not warrant such drastic measures, she said.

“Those whom we’ve lost represent less than a half of 1% of our population, which has caused us to shut down our entire state and everything that makes Nevada unique,” Goodman said.
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At today’s City Council meeting, Goodman stressed the economic toll that the shutdown has taken on the state and on Southern Nevada, which has the majority of Nevada’s population.

“900,000 have lost jobs. 300,000 have already filed for unemployment,” Goodman said. “These are families that no longer have the ability to buy food for their children and other loved ones.”

Without a plan in place for how and when to reopen the economy, Goodman said, the shutdown “makes no sense.” She also questioned whether it was backed up by data.

“From my perspective, we must open our city, we must open Southern Nevada and we must open the state of Nevada,” she said.

Many health experts have warned against reopening the economy too early, saying it could lead to more preventable deaths.
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Ward 5 Councilman Cedric Crear said that although his two small businesses have suffered during the shutdown, the economy should not be a reason to ignore the advice of health officials.

Crear said Clark County and Nevada would have more COVID-19 cases if businesses had stayed open and people not followed the governor’s stay-at-home order.

“One death is just too many, and I think as we get more testing into the market, we’re going to realize there are more people who are infected,” he said.
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FYI, Mayor Goodman. This is not "just the flu".

Nobody wants to be Carnival Cruise Lines right now. They are getting criticized for not shutting down cruises earlier, when they first learned of the danger from the virus.

What if Vegas had stayed open longer and hundreds of people got sick? What if it was thousands? Would we see a cover like this, but about Vegas?

https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2020-carnival-cruise-coronavirus/

Carnival’s ships have become a floating testament to the viciousness of the new coronavirus and raised questions about corporate negligence and fleet safety.
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The Mayor is right that there is a high economic price to pay for this shutdown.
https://thenevadaindependent.com/article/the-indy-explains-whats-happening-with-nevada-unemployment-insurance

303,705 initial unemployment claims have been filed in Nevada from March 15-April 11. Once some of the casinos stop paying employees on May 15, if they are not reopened or benefits extended, will mean more people will file. It is estimated that 900,000 people are out of work in Nevada. And the unemployment filing process has a number of backups and issues.

Nevada's Economy Among The Most Vulnerable
https://www.reviewjournal.com/business/nevadas-economy-among-most-vulnerable-to-virus-impacts-reports-find-2007099/

With the Strip effectively closed by the coronavirus pandemic, job losses have soared to record levels in Nevada.

Unemployment has shot higher nationwide as well amid the turmoil, but given their heavy dependence on tourism to fuel the economy, Las Vegas and Nevada are among the most vulnerable places in the nation to COVID-19, recent reports show.
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Oxford Economics last week ranked Nevada the second-most economically vulnerable state behind Maine. The analytics firm said the Silver State gets more than four times as much of its gross domestic product from the tourism sector as the country as a whole.
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“Even if we were under a glass bubble and everything was open here … there wouldn’t be people traveling here,” Restrepo said.
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But Las Vegas isn't going ignored by the Federal Government. The CARES Act awarded the Las Vegas (McCarran) Airport the 8th largest grant.
https://www.nevadacurrent.com/blog/las-vegas-airport-gets-195-5-million-from-cares-act/

The CARES Act includes $10 billion in grants for airports. Las Vegas got $195.5 million

Under the Airport Improvement Program, the Federal Aviation Administration administers grants to airports each year. In addition to increased funding, the CARES Act waives customary local cost-sharing requirements.

“Getting our airport back at full capacity will be vital to boosting Southern Nevada’s tourism economy,” Rep. Dina Titus said in a release announcing the grant. The money “will help cover lost revenue during the pandemic and assist in the preparation for a return to normal operations when it is safe to do so,” the release said.
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The Fed also tried to loosen the guidelines for the SBA Loans to allow small casinos to get assistance. Unfortunately, they didn't loosen the guidelines enough for most Nevada gaming establishments.
https://thenevadaindependent.com/article/access-to-loans-broadened-for-gaming-businesses-but-many-nevada-taverns-still-left-out

“I went to apply for the loans,” said Malone. “And when you go on SBA.gov, and you start filling in the eligibility, there’s a check that you’d have to make to say that you do not make more than one third of your revenue from legal gambling. Well, that knocks out my business and all the other taverns in the valley and in the state.”

While the SBA originally blocked from a loan any business that derived one third of its annual revenue from legal gambling, the SBA guidelines were revised on Tuesday to allow “small casinos” to qualify for Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loans as long as gaming revenue made up less than half of total business revenue and was less than $1 million. But the change still leaves most gaming businesses, such as Malone’s, without help.

“The way the guidance is structured, the number of Nevada casino-gaming operators that will be able to participate in the Paycheck Protection Program would appear to approach zero,” said Jeremy Aguero, a principal with Las Vegas-based Applied Analysis. “There may be a few that qualify, but the criteria are such that the vast majority will remain excluded.”
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And Nevada Senator Jacky Rosen is among the Democrats invited to join the task force on opening the economy.
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/04/16/white-house-congress-advise-reopening-economy-190027

Here are the Senator's comments on this:

So, what do we know about reopening the casinos? Not much, but we are starting to get some people talking about how it might be possible.

Casino Executives discuss reopening with dealers in masks.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-16/vegas-casino-executives-discuss-reopening-with-dealers-in-masks

The deliberations have included potentially allowing small businesses off of the famous Strip to open first, so that locals could get back to work, according to people familiar with the talks. The executives have also discussed opening facilities nearby so that all casino workers -- and perhaps even tourists -- could get tested for the coronavirus.

The city, the largest gambling market in the U.S., would open its giant casinos with as little as one-third of their rooms available. Entrances would be limited, and guests’ temperatures would be checked with noninvasive methods. Casino employees would wear masks and gloves, and gamblers would sit at least a chair apart at blackjack tables.
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The companies are also discussing enhanced cleaning techniques, something unions have requested.

“We’re asking the companies to have more cleaning everywhere -- the rooms, casino, special teams to work with new chemicals,” Geoconda Argüello-Kline, secretary-treasurer of Culinary Workers Union Local 226, said last week. The casinos “have to have more people, so the people can have the area more clean.”
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Howard Stutz also has a piece about reopening -
Mega Resorts may initially feel like boutiques, Investment banker says Strip Recovery will be slow, but locals market positioned for a rebound.
https://thenevadaindependent.com/article/mega-resorts-may-initially-feel-like-boutiques-investment-banker-says-strip-recovery-will-be-slow-but-locals-gaming-market-positioned-for-a-rebound

An investment banker who has been involved in the gaming sector over the last four decades told Nevada’s casino leadership that an economic recovery on the Strip from the coronavirus pandemic shutdown will be slow, accomplished in phases and is dependent on McCarran International Airport traffic returning to a high volume.

However, Joel Simkins, head of gaming and leisure investment banking for SunTrust Robinson Humphrey in New York, said the Las Vegas locals market, primarily properties operated by Red Rock Resorts and Boyd Gaming, is better positioned to rebound along with the local economy.
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“While there are many risks (that) I have considered for our sector, the concept of a pandemic that would cause every building to close might have been out of a science fiction, dystopian thriller,” Simkins wrote.
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Simkins said the Strip’s recovery “will be measured” and take on a “rational approach,” hinting that ancillary fees, such as resort and paid parking fees, could be reduced or eliminated.

But it will take time for revenues and cash flows to return to meaningful levels.

“Not surprisingly, operators will need to use incentives to drive traffic, as was experienced in the last recession,” Simkins said. “We are all learning that you cannot outrun a total cessation of the business.”
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MGM Resorts International acting CEO Bill Hornbuckle told CNBC earlier this month the company will begin reopening its 13 gaming and non-gaming Strip properties, “when it is safe.” He added that the state’s largest casino operator, “won’t necessarily want to be the first to open. We’ll open this intelligently and hopefully with some forethought.”

Simkins agreed with that approach for all Strip resorts, primarily because there won’t be enough visitation to fill hotels until McCarran Airport sees an increase in flight traffic.

“We expect a phased approach to the resumption of operations, particularly as the pace at which airlift comes back to feed the beast,” he wrote.
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When customers do return, Simkins told gaming leaders, he would expect safety measures and social distancing protocols for guests and employees to remain in place, such as fewer operating hotel rooms, a limited number of restaurants being open with reduced hours at those locations, and other measures to accommodate varying levels of demand. Space restrictions in between operating slot machines will limit the number of active games and seats at table games will be reduced.

“Mega Resorts may initially feel like boutique (hotels),” he noted.

Staffing levels will also be brought back slowly. Simkins said casino operators will want to bring back as many employees as possible, though.

“While we believe staffing levels will be meaningfully lower, retaining legacy employees as opposed to beginning another onboarding process will be far more efficient,” he wrote.
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Meanwhile the consolidation of companies within the locals market – which has placed the bulk of the business under Boyd and Red Rock – will be “more constructive” to the recovery. The challenges include how quickly unemployment in Southern Nevada rebounds and whether customers are willing to spend discretionary money after losing weeks or months of pay.

“Understandably, how the core retiree group that populates most local casinos during the mid-week feels about gaming after pain in their investment accounts will likely dictate the pace of the gross gaming revenue recovery,” Simkins wrote.

The slot machine route and tavern operations were “hit hard” during the recession, and it’s “unclear” how quickly the businesses will rebound, “granted the product offering has improved materially since 2008,” he wrote.
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Jeff Gillan has a great 2:30 video here about what it will take to reopen the casinos and what that might look like. Including an interview inside a closed Caesars Palace with President Gary Selesner.
https://news3lv.com/news/local/what-does-a-gaming-reopen-look-like-in-las-vegas

"In some ways, it's easier to close than reopen 'cause you have to do an awful lot of thinking about what services you're going to be able to provide to make it a compelling experience for the guest, and make it a safe place for the guest and employees," he (Selesner) told me a few weeks ago in front of an empty check-in desk next to a deserted gaming floor.
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“The resort industry’s priority remains the health and safety of our employees, guests and fellow residents, and our members look forward to reopening when the governor and his medical advisory team determine it is safe to do so,” says a statement from the Nevada Resort Association, the local resort industry’s trade group. "We continue to be in close contact with the Governor, the Gaming Control Board and state and local agencies and are monitoring the evolving situation."
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"What most experts are saying is that we're gonna see companies like MGM will probably open maybe a couple of properties, and not others. But only small parts of properties. Not all the restaurants are gonna be open. It's gonna be a while before we see a showroom open," Stutz says.

And when the opening happens, expect social distancing: fewer people at gaming tables and fewer slots.

"I don't know if we're gonna see poker for a while, 'cause you know, poker requires a lot of players," Stutz said.
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The bad news is the Las Vegas economy won't get healthy until the rest of the world heals, too.
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“The question I think is a good one, and it's the one that people bring up all the time. But this isn't a function of the calendar. This is a function of science,” says Jeremy Aguerro, the principal of the Las Vegas consulting firm Applied Analysis.

And that's the balancing act: Stay closed too long, and more jobs vanish.

Open too soon, and become America's next COVID-19 hotspot.
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This Politico poll suggests that most Americans are not in a hurry to reopen businesses, in light of the dangers of the Coronavirus.
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/04/15/poll-dont-stop-social-distancing-coronavirus-spread-187290

(A) new POLITICO/Morning Consult poll shows the vast majority of voters support continuing the social-distancing measures that appear to be helping the U.S. hamper the rapid spread of Covid-19, the illness caused by the virus.

More than eight in 10 voters, 81 percent, say Americans “should continue to social distance for as long as is needed to curb the spread of coronavirus, even if it means continued damage to the economy.” Only 10 percent say Americans “should stop social distancing to stimulate the economy, even if it means increasing the spread of coronavirus.” Nine percent of voters have no opinion.

While Democrats (89 percent) are more likely than Republicans (72 percent) to say Americans should continue the “social distancing” measures, large majorities in all demographic groups say it’s more important to stop the spread of the virus than to resume economic activity that could undermine those mitigation efforts.
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By a ratio of more than 2 to 1, voters say they are more concerned about “the public health impact of coronavirus, including the spread of the disease which would cause more deaths,” than they are about “the economic impact of coronavirus including the effect on the stock market and increased unemployment.” Overall, voters break toward the public-health impact, 64 percent to 29 percent — though it’s more narrow among Republicans, 51 percent to 43 percent.
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Three in four, 75 percent, say it’s more important for the government to address the spread of the virus, while 17 percent say it’s more important for the government to manage the economy.

Voters are skeptical about their fellow Americans returning to work while the virus continues to ravage the nation, the poll shows. Just 37 percent would support allowing some Americans to return to work as long as the virus is still spreading, fewer than the 52 percent who would oppose Americans returning to work under those circumstances. And even fewer, 27 percent, would support allowing Americans under age 45 — who researchers say are less likely to die from Covid-19 — to work while older Americans continue to stay home.

But majorities do want returning workers to take significant precautions if they do go back: 76 percent would support their testing negative for the virus before being allowed to work again, 60 percent say they should take an antibody test to determine whether they’ve been exposed to the virus, and 76 percent support workers’ being required to wear face masks.
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GOP Senate Leader asks Sisolak for ‘clarity and specifics’ on next steps for state in COVID-19 pandemic
https://thenevadaindependent.com/article/coronavirus-live-blog-week-six

Republican state Senate Minority Leader James Settelmeyer is publicly asking Gov. Steve Sisolak for more details on the state’s economic recovery plan from the COVID-19 pandemic.

In a letter sent to the governor on Thursday, Settelmeyer requested more information for the public and members of the Legislature on when the state plans to lift several emergency directives requiring the closure of nonessential businesses, K-12 schools and social-distancing mandates.

“I appreciate hearing from the Governor’s staff each week, but I believe there is room to improve communication as we move to reopen Nevada’s economy,” Settelmeyer said in a statement. “I understand the need to remain focused on the health and wellbeing of our residents, but it is also our duty to provide the public with clarity and specifics about Nevada’s plan for health and economic recovery. It is not too early to begin this conversation.”
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I agree this information would be helpful to help give people an idea of what comes next. Whether or not Sisolak feels he can answer these questions right now is another matter.

Specifically, Settelmeyer asked Sisolak’s office for details on:

The likelihood of extending the nonessential business closure order past the current expiration date of April 30

The deadline to decide whether schools in the state can re-open

Any priority list of nonessential businesses that may be able to reopen, with or without limitations

Whether future COVID-19 related task forces will include bi-partisan representation “from stakeholders and subject matter experts from regions across the state”

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That's all I've got about the reopening and the virus right now. But there is some other Nevada News that might be of interest to VMBers.

Ticketmaster took some heat from their new refund policy for postponed shows:
https://lambgoat.com/news/32971/Ticketmaster-respond-to-outcry-over-refund-policy

...(Y)ears of frustration and animus towards Ticketmaster from the general public has yielded an angry mob of pitchfork-wielding citizens (including celebrities and politicians) demanding investigations and class action lawsuits.

In an attempt to blunt the severe criticism of its refund policy, Ticketmaster has issued the following statement (directed to customers in the United States and Canada):

Ticketmaster serves as the sales platform for event organizers worldwide. Our standard practice is for clients to hold the cash from their ticket sales. Clients using our platform also retain the ability to set individual policies for their postponed or rescheduled events.

Typically, event organizers have had the flexibility to offer refunds for virtually all postponed and rescheduled events. However, the unprecedented volume of over 30,000 events impacted to date, coupled with continued uncertainty over setting new dates while awaiting clearance from regional governments, has led to event organizers needing additional time to reschedule their events before deciding to offer refund options.

As of today, over 11,000 events, including over 4,000 postponed sports, concerts and arts events, have already authorized refunds. While we cannot guarantee all event organizers will offer refunds on their rescheduled events, we anticipate the vast majority will make a refund window available once new dates have been determined. In addition, Ticketmaster continues to issue refunds for all canceled events.

The entire Ticketmaster team is working from home and doing its best to respond to all fans and clients. We will continue to keep fans up to date on the status of events via email and via our Covid-19 event portal.
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Officials say no long-term problems with Allegiant Stadium funding, but long-term pressure could mount.
https://thenevadaindependent.com/article/officials-say-no-short-term-problems-with-las-vegas-stadium-funding-but-long-term-pressure-could-mount

Despite nonexistent room tax collections while Las Vegas hotels are shut down during the coronavirus pandemic, the taxpayer portion of the Allegiant Stadium funding is not expected to be affected in the short term.

The long-term effects are still in question, however.

Taxpayers are on the hook for $750 million of the $2 billion total construction cost for the stadium that will be home to the NFL’s Raiders and the NCAA’s University of Nevada-Las Vegas Rebels after the state legislature passed a bill in 2016 to allow Clark County to increase its lodging tax to help fund the facility’s construction.
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Visitors to hotel rooms on or near the famed Las Vegas Strip (on which the stadium will border) pay an additional tax of 0.88 percent, increasing the average nightly rate by $1.50. The increase is 0.5 percent for rooms within the rest of the stadium district, a 25-mile radius around the Clark County Government Center downtown.

Prior to the spread of the novel Coronavirus business was booming in Vegas, with the portion of the room tax collection allocated for the stadium reaching $24.9 million for the first six months of the 2019-20 fiscal year. That was 6.3 percent higher than the same time frame a year earlier as room-tax collection hit record levels in five of the past eight months, the Las Vegas Review-Journal reported.

Clark County has collected nearly $140 million since the tax increase was put into effect, which is on track to meet estimates over the 30-year collection period. But, the current pandemic is now putting lodging tax collections to a halt after Gov. Steve Sisolak (D) ordered all non-essential businesses closed.
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“In terms of the ability to make bond payments, not only was the Stadium Authority board relatively conservative in its estimates of room tax, but it also has about a year and a half worth of reserve revenue set aside to ensure that the bond payments are made,” he said. “Even if the room tax was essentially to drop to zero for the next year — which no one expects, I want to be very clear about that — there would still be revenue available to make those bond payments.”
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Not Nevada, but IGT and Circa Sports have teamed up for Colorado's mobile sports betting
https://www.cdcgamingreports.com/igt-to-team-up-with-circa-sports-in-colorado-mobile-sports-betting/

International Game Technology said Thursday it will provide the technology to power the Circa Sports mobile wagering application in Colorado.

Earlier this year, Circa Sports, which is owned by downtown Las Vegas casino operator Derek Stevens, announced plans to launch its mobile sports betting application in Colorado in partnership with Century Casino Cripple Creek.

Colorado, which legalized sports betting last year, is still anticipating launching the activity in conjunction with the state’s casinos in Black Hawk, Central City and Cripple Creek by May 1. Mobile sports wagering was approved by voters along with retail sportsbooks.
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And not casino related at all, any maybe not of interest to anyone here except for me, but...
Volunteers work to reduce wild horse population.
https://www.nevadacurrent.com/2020/04/16/volunteers-work-to-reduce-wild-horse-population/

A group of volunteers in Northern Nevada are taking refuge amidst the coronavirus pandemic in the great outdoors while providing a much needed service.

What are they doing? Darting wild horses with birth control.

With a team of two dozen volunteers and a budget of $182,000, the American Wild Horse Campaign (AWHC) last year vaccinated more wild mares with fertility control than the Bureau of Land Management, with its $81 million-a-year budget, according to the campaign.

And even in the midst of a global pandemic wild horses are doing what they always do at this time of year — birthing and breeding — elevating the need for humane population control.
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Who knew there was birth control for horses? But good on them for trying something other than killing them to thin the herds.

I was asked if it would be helpful for people to see this flyer, shared by a VMBer's employer about how to clean yourself when you get home. I believe these measures are meant for people in the healthcare industry who would be more exposed than a normal person taking the dog for a walk in their suburban neighborhood, but it's a good guideline you can use to evaluate the things you are doing.

And lastly, I wanted to share this. I know a lot of us are hanging on by our fingernails right now. Stress levels are high and uncertainty is rampant.

April is National Stress Awareness Month, a timely coincidence during the coronavirus crisis. CBSN's Reena Ninan spoke to therapist and author Laurie Nadel about how to manage stress amid a global pandemic.

The therapist offers some techniques and practices that can help you process stress. It may be too woo-woo for some of you, but I can attest to the breathing colors exercise working in times of severe stress.

https://www.cbsnews.com/video/how-to-manage-your-stress-during-a-pandemic/

So, that's it for today. I hope that some of the discussion here about how Vegas might reopen and what that might look like is helpful more than harmful to many of you. It's a challenging time. Be a helper. Look for the small gifts in your day. Feel blessed if you are lucky to be mostly unscathed right now. And take a deep breath, hold it for a second or two and then let it go as you push out all your fear, stress, anger, restlessness. It helps.

Be well, VMB!

Sonya · Apr 17, 2020

I don't know what to tell you, but how about we start with this quote from a Governor Sisolak press conference last night.

“It’s not going to be just flip on the light switch and everything goes back to normal because that’s not how we’re doing things. It would be unfair for me to just guess a date. I won’t do that.” - Governor Sisolak

Here is more about what was said in the press conference:
https://thenevadaindependent.com/article/sisolak-promises-details-on-states-reopening-plan-next-week-more-testing-needed

Gov. Steve Sisolak says he expects to know much more next week about whether conditions are right to either end or extend directives that have shut down much of the state, but cautioned that he had no “benchmark date” in place and that any easing of restrictions would likely be gradual.

“I cannot take the chance of overwhelming our health care system, and not having a way back out of it,” he said, adding that there may be opportunities to relax restrictions “and then we’ll see how it works after a little while, if we don’t have an enormous spike in positives or emergency room usage.”

The governor declined to name concrete milestones, if any, that he needs to see before lifting emergency directives that have ground public life in the state to a halt. But he mentioned broad-strokes metrics he’s monitoring, including modeling and projections, health risk assessments, testing capacity, hospital bed capacity and the ability of hospitals to deal with future surges.

The ability to conduct dramatically more tests will become even more important as restrictions are lifted, Pandori said, not for the reason of diagnosing sick people but for “gathering intelligence,” including understanding when the virus is carried asymptomatically and how fatal it actually is.

“This is about finding out where the enemy is, how much of it,” he said, “and finding out that number for two reasons — how much risk is there out there as we start to come out of this and try to reenter normalcy? But also to ask, ‘hey, when the smoke clears, how many people were infected and are infected’, because we still don’t know that denominator.”
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He had a response to questions about Mayor Goodman's comments too:

Sisolak also pushed back on a growing chorus of elected officials — including, most notably, Las Vegas Mayor Carolyn Goodman — who have chafed at the ongoing shutdown as “insanity” and economically devastating. Goodman said Wednesday that “being closed is killing us already, that “the death toll represented less than half a percentage point of the population” and that there was no rationale for the shutdown to begin with.

“I don’t know who she’s relying on for her experts, because none of my experts have given me anywhere near that information,” he said.

Sisolak said that “some people are more concerned with the business side of this than the human toll that this virus is taking” and added that “I will put the safety of our folks ahead of any profits.” He also questioned the utility of opening certain businesses right away when the world is still confronting the pandemic.

“People who think you can just say ‘We’re open back up,’ and suddenly these hotels are going to be filled, don’t understand how the hotel industry works,” he said.
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Here are the White House Guidelines for reopening up different communities.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/openingamerica/

If you look at the plan, or listen to any of the governors, you will hear that we need more testing before we can open up. But do we have enough tests?
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/coronavirus-testing-must-double-or-triple-u-s-can-safely-n1185881

Testing for the coronavirus would have to be at least doubled or tripled from its current levels to allow for even a partial reopening of America's economy, public health experts say, but it is unclear how soon such an ambitious goal could be reached amid persistent shortages of testing supplies and a lack of coordination from the Trump administration.

Without diagnostic testing on a massive scale, federal and state officials and private companies will lack a clear picture of who has been infected, who can safely return to work, how the virus is spreading and when stay-at-home orders can be eased, public health experts say.

"We are an order of magnitude off right now from where we should be," said Dylan George, an expert in infectious disease modeling who advised the administration of President Barack Obama in combating the Ebola epidemic. "Testing is the perpetual problem here."
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The percentage of the U.S. population that has been tested for COVID-19, about 1 percent, remains far too small to consider going back to normal routines, said Dr. Dan Hanfling, who worked in the National Healthcare Preparedness Program during the Obama and Trump administrations.

"I don't think we're near it. I don't think we're close," Hanfling said.
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There has also been some indication that this virus is more widespread than we thought.
https://abcnews.go.com/Health/antibody-research-coronavirus-widespread/story?id=70206121

A critical question in the path towards the future is how many people actually have protective novel coronavirus antibodies and possible immunity? Two research teams in California -- backed by armies of dedicated volunteers -- set out to answer this very question and the first set of results are in.

The first large-scale community test of 3,300 people in Santa Clara County found that 2.5 to 4.2% of those tested were positive for antibodies -- a number suggesting a far higher past infection rate than the official count.
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“Our findings suggest that there is somewhere between 50- and 80-fold more infections in our county than what’s known by the number of cases than are reported by our department of public health," Dr. Eran Bendavid, the associate professor of medicine at Stanford University who led the study, said in an interview with ABC News' Diane Sawyer.
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But there are some good signs in Nevada for testing. Yesterday I mentioned that UNR in Reno is making swabs. And Jim Murren's COVID Task Force has some news too.
https://www.cdcgamingreports.com/nevada-to-receive-testing-materials-assistance-from-uae-via-private-sector-task-force/

Nevada will receive COVID-19 testing materials from the United Arab Emirates and begin a scientific collaboration with a leading technology company in Abu Dhabi through an agreement reached by the private Nevada COVID-19 Response, Relief and Recovery Task Force.

The scientific collaboration is with the UAE’s G42, an artificial intelligence and cloud computing company, which will work with University Medical Center (UMC) in Las Vegas. The goal is to develop Nevada’s first high-volume COVID-19 testing laboratory to support the processing of patient samples from hospitals, doctor’s offices, curbside testing locations, and other health care providers throughout the state.

In a statement, G42 officials said the COVID-19 testing materials and equipment being provided will serve as a catalyst in Nevada’s plans to increase its testing capacity both in the short- and long-term.
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In this article they indicate that little more than 1% have been tested in Nevada
https://www.nevadacurrent.com/blog/sisolak-thinking-nevada-reopening-will-be-more-by-industry-than-by-location/

“Testing, along with social distancing, may be the most important weapon we’ve got, or armor if you like,” Pandori said. It’s providing us the valuable intelligence we need in this war.”

So far, only a little more than one percent of the state’s population has been tested for COVID-19. Sisolak and Pandori declined to say what level of testing would provide the information health experts need to determine the spread of the virus.

“We have to press on the gas pedal and get even more testing done,” Pandori said. “This is about gathering intelligence. Finding out where the enemy is.”

Antibody tests, which would determine who has had COVID-19, “are a reality and they are on their way,” Pandori said.
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But, remember, this comment means we may know more about how/when Vegas may start opening up next week:

Sisolak said he intends to release details next week of his plans for reopening the Nevada economy.
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So, hopefully more information specific to Las Vegas soon.

They are releasing demographic information on COVID fatalities in Nevada
https://thenevadaindependent.com/article/coronavirus-live-blog-week-six

The health district data released Friday for the first time includes a breakdown by age and gender for those who have died after contracting COVID-19:

Two-thirds of them, 63.7 percent, have been male, while only 36.3 percent have been female.

Most of them, 78.2 percent, have been over the age of 65, though 13.7 percent were 50 to 64, 7.3 percent were 25 to 49, and one person, 0.8 percent, was between the ages of 18 and 24.

More than 40 percent of them have been white, 15.3 percent have been Hispanic, 16.1 percent have been black, 16.1 percent have been Asian, 3.2 percent have been Pacific Islander and another 3.2 percent identified as other.

The data also show that while the elderly are more likely to die from the disease, a significant number of younger people have been hospitalized with the virus:

35.8 percent hospitalized are over the age of 65, with another 33.3 percent between the ages of 50 and 64, 28.3 percent between 25 and 49, 2.2 percent between 18 and 24, two people (0.3 percent) between 5 and 17, and one person (0.1 percent) under the age of 5.

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LVRJ has an article with Patient Zero, the guy who was the first presumptive positive in Nevada.
https://www.reviewjournal.com/local/north-las-vegas/patient-zero-in-nevadas-covid-19-fight-mending-after-month-in-a-coma-2008589/

That’s when doctors told him he had been in the hospital for about a month and was “patient zero” in Nevada’s now-raging battle against the new coronavirus.

Pipkins was admitted to the VA Medical Center in North Las Vegas on March 2. Three days later, he became the first presumptive positive case in the state of Nevada.
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Pipkins began experiencing symptoms in mid-February, when he visited Seattle with his son, Ronald Jr., to check out the 17-year-old’s future school at Central Washington University.

The last few nights he was there, he began to feel cold and weak and had a hard time breathing. When he tried to exercise, he struggled to complete his regimen. He dropped six pounds in four days.

Though he knew he was sick, he didn’t think anything about the pandemic then ravaging Asia.

“My mind never even thought about corona at all,” he said.

When Pipkins got to the emergency room, he was initially admitted for pneumonia. When his fever spiked to 107, doctors tested him for COVID-19.

Early on, doctors at the VA hospital put him into a medically induced coma so Pipkins’ body could preserve the energy needed to fight the virus.
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This Guardian article proposes that we are closer to the beginning of this virus, than the end.
People are understandably looking for good news. But the truth is, we’re nowhere near controlling coronavirus
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/apr/16/number-coronavirus-pandemic

Talk of the “peak” can be misleading, because it’s not clear whether you are talking about the Matterhorn or Table Mountain – both have a summit, but the peak is far more pronounced in one than the other. In countries such as Italy (unlike Wuhan) the initial surge in the Covid-19 pandemic has not evaporated quickly. There are multiple reasons for this but the most important is that the impact of physical distancing achieved in China has been hard to accomplish elsewhere, mostly because of the freedoms we correctly value in liberal democracies.

Worse, there may be a mountain range. In other words, what is happening right now could be just one peak – not the peak. And the reason for this is that despite all those positive signs from antibody testing, the huge majority of the population is not immune.

An editorial in the British Medical Journal has reported data from China suggesting that as many as four in five cases of Sars-CoV-2 infection could be asymptomatic. It then goes on to quote people from the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine in Oxford, who say that if this is true “What the hell are we locking down for?” I wish those people would be brave enough to go and repeat that opinion in an ER in the Bronx right now, in which actual medicine is going on. Worrying about the exact rate of asymptomatic infection, or the currently unknown duration of immunity and a possible “second wave”, is like politely applauding the performance in a jazz club and murmuring “nice” while the building is demolished around you and the piano player gets decapitated.
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Governments around the world are attempting ways to keep jobs and businesses afloat while lockdowns are in place – but the pressure remains to swiftly end such shutdowns. I get that this is going to be a mammoth strain on the economy. But the deaths of many thousands of people would be too: it is simply not possible to thoroughly insulate an economy from the impact of a pandemic of this kind.
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But enough about that virus. Vegas is still doing Vegas things. I'm happy to see some construction projects on the webcams and photos of the Strip. I also saw this photo of them installing huge palm trees by the Welcome to Las Vegas Sign.

I look forward to getting my picture taken there again some day.

And I know we're all missing Vegas right now, but maybe, just maybe, does this help a little bit?

Nobody likes those creepy hoppers all over the sidewalks.

And even if everyone isn't open for business, Vegas is making the best of what they've got.

Local cannabis harvest machine makers create machine to sanitize masks.
https://www.8newsnow.com/news/local-news/greenbroz-inc-creates-ppe-sterilization-machine/

A number of companies are changing what they do in order to pitch in and provide much-needed supplies during the COVID-19 pandemic. A North Las Vegas cannabis harvesting manufacturer is helping with the shortage of personal protective equipment.

The CEO of Greenbroz, Inc. knew he wanted to help and took the resources he had to make a device that can sterilize PPE, like masks.

He and his partners came up with the device, which looks like a tumbling washing machine, but it isn’t washing clothes, it’s sterilizing them. The machine uses chlorine dioxide to get deep into the pores of clothing and masks, and it kills bacteria and viruses.
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And last, but not least, I saw this article that I don't entirely understand, but some of you might find it informative.
Las Vegas Sands suspends quarterly dividends, but will continue $5.5B in Macau, Singapore projects
https://www.cdcgamingreports.com/las-vegas-sands-suspends-quarterly-dividends-but-will-continue-5-5b-in-macau-singapore-projects/

The company said in a statement late Thursday night it was suspending its dividend distribution – $3.16 per share annually – as the casino operator deals with the business impact from the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic. Las Vegas Sands will continue forward with its $5.5 billion in development projects in Macau and Singapore.

In a statement, CEO Sheldon Adelson said the company has “the balance sheet strength” to “enable us to emerge from this pandemic with all our promising future growth opportunities fully intact.”
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Analysts overwhelmingly praised the dividend suspension.

Bank of America gaming analyst Shaun Kelly said suspending the dividends saved the company between $700 million and $1 billion per quarter and reduced Las Vegas Sands’ cash burn rate by roughly 50%, from $23 million a day to $12 million a day.

“Las Vegas Sands was in a very strong liquidity position prior to this move with $8 billion of cash and available revolver, plus another $2.4 billion delayed draw facility ring-fenced for (the) Singapore construction,” Kelly told investors Friday morning.
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“We remain extremely optimistic about an eventual recovery of travel and tourism spending across our markets, as well as our future growth prospects,” Adelson said. “We are fortunate that our financial strength will allow us to continue to execute our previously announced capital expenditure programs in both Macao and Singapore.”

Las Vegas Sands will report first quarter earnings on Wednesday, where the company will continue to discuss the coronavirus pandemic.

“The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on our business has been unprecedented, and I have never seen anything like it in my over 70 years in business,” Adelson said.

He said the company’s greatest priority is “supporting our team members” and assisting the local communities in Macau, Singapore, and Las Vegas.”
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Thanks for reading. That's all I've got for now.

Sonya · Apr 19, 2020

I will do a longer update later today or tomorrow with more news, but this morning an Op-Ed was published from Wynn CEO, Matt Maddox, along with him posting a detailed plan for reopening on the Wynn website.

Here are the details.

https://thenevadaindependent.com/article/a-plan-to-re-open-nevada

Please read all of this:

At Wynn Resorts we care deeply about our family of employees and our communities. When we decided to be the first to close in Nevada, before the state required the closure of casino resorts, we did it with a heavy heart but knew it was in the best interest of our employees and community. We also understood that asking 15,000 employees to stay home during the pandemic was challenging. We chose to pay all our full-time and part-time employees for 60 days through May 15th including an estimate for tips they could earn during the closure. It is costing us approximately $3 million per day or $180 million for two months.

I commend our governor for making the difficult decision and taking early action in the fight against COVID-19. I believe his decisions saved lives as we were facing potential exponential growth in COVID-19 exposure, given that Las Vegas caters to millions of people from all over the world. Some of our elected officials have questioned the closure, calling it “insanity”. That opinion has no basis in science or data and should be ignored.

Currently, Nevada is well positioned relative to many other states. Clearly we will see increases in cases as we accelerate testing. The Roosevelt aircraft carrier data has shown that of the hundreds of sailors that have tested positive, the majority are asymptomatic. Stanford University just published research that COVID-19 cases could be 50x higher than reported given the vast amount of asymptomatic and mildly symptomatic individuals. That means as we increase testing, we will see more cases.

So I believe it is critical to monitor our hospitalizations as we increase testing. We passed our “peak” hospitalizations based on most national models and our hospitals were not overrun. Our COVID-19 related deaths per million are below the national average. We have also acquired enough personal protective equipment (PPE) through a public-private partnership to sufficiently supply our medical community that we all rely on for months.

We now face a new, rapidly decelerating curve we must “flatten”. Our economy is in a freefall. Nevada will likely be one of the hardest hit states in the nation and suffer very high unemployment. It is imperative to flatten this curve so we can re-emerge in a safe, sustainable way. Our detailed plan (which you can see below) to keep employees and customers safe upon reopening can also be found at www.wynnlasvegas.com. It relies on the best available science on sanitization methods in consultation with professional infectious disease experts from the best academic institutions in the country. We will continue to refine and update the plan as our experts provide us more advice. Our procedures are extensive and not applicable to all resorts in our industry.

In addition, I have been on calls almost daily with one of the country’s leading public health and pandemic preparedness experts, as well as various leaders in our medical community representing our hospitals and they agree that an incremental reopening makes sense and that science and data must lead us out of this in a safe fashion.
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And then he puts out his basic plan for how Nevada should proceed.

In order to be able to recover and reopen in Las Vegas, this is what I believe are the right steps to take:

1. The governor’s appointed Task Force should be focused on COVID- 19 testing capabilities and safely reopening the economy.

2. Reopen parts of the local Nevada economy in early May. Begin with reduced occupancy, physical distancing measures in place, temperature checks and no large gatherings. We all need to wear a mask. Wearing a mask is uncomfortable; however, it will allow our economy to reopen faster.

3. Follow the data provided by a team of modeling experts tracking benchmarks based on the following criteria:

a. Increases in COVID-19 testing velocity.

b. Hospitalizations and deaths per million should not exceed the national average over any sustained period.

c. Hospital critical care bed availability should be reserved based on a ratio of current COVID-19 patients in the event of a spike.

d. Full transparent data should be public, web-based and accessible to anyone.

4. Assuming in mid- to late-May we are still in line with the benchmarks, slowly begin to reopen the Las Vegas Strip with extensive safety measures in place.

5. Monitor the data every day. If we need to, marginally pull back or move forward.

The main obstacle on the list above is widespread testing. Our state, the medical community, the Task Force and resort industry leaders are focused on ways to vastly enhance testing, and I anticipate it will happen over the coming weeks.

I understand that if we incrementally reopen we might have to pull back if a spike in cases occurs that jeopardizes our health care system capacity. However, the only way to cross this river is one stone at a time, and we need to put our feet in the water before it is too late.
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And if you go to the website at https://www.visitwynn.com/documents/Wynn-Health-Plan.pdf you can see the full, detailed plan. I will include some higlights that might be of interest to VMBers.

Please keep in mind, these dates and methods are not the deciding factor here. This is a suggestion from the CEO of Wynn, not the plan forward from the Governor, who will ultimately make the decisions on what and when.

1 Employee & Guest Health
The health and safety of our employees and guests is our number one priority.

Thermal Cameras. Points of entry will be limited to allow our security team to conduct noninvasive temperature checks utilizing thermal cameras. Anyone displaying a temperature over 100.0°F 1 will be taken to a private area for a secondary temporal temperature screening. Employees or guests confirmed to have a temperature over 100.0°F will not be allowed entry to the property and will be directed towards appropriate medical care.

Physical Distancing. Guests will be advised to practice physical distancing by standing at least six feet away from other groups of people not traveling with them while standing in lines, using elevators or moving around the property. Restaurant tables, slot machines and other physical layouts will be arranged to ensure appropriate distancing. Employees will be reminded not to touch their faces and to practice physical distancing by standing at least six feet away from guests and other employees whenever possible. All resort outlets will comply with, or exceed, local or state mandated occupancy limits.

Hand Sanitizer. Hand sanitizer dispensers, touchless whenever possible, will be placed at key guest and employee entrances and contact areas such as driveways, reception areas, hotel lobbies, the casino floor, restaurant entrances, meeting and convention spaces, elevator landings, pools, salons and exercise areas. Hand lotion will be provided in guest rooms and throughout the back of house (in touchless dispensers) for employees.

Front of the House Signage. There will be health and hygiene reminders throughout the property including the proper way to wear, handle and dispose of masks. Table game electronic signs will also be used for messaging and communication.
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Employee & Guest Health Concerns. Our employees have been given clear instructions on how to respond swiftly and report all presumed cases of COVID-19 on property to the Southern Nevada Health District (SNHD). We will be ready to provide support to our guests. Employees are instructed to stay home if they do not feel well and are instructed to contact a manager if they notice a coworker or guest with a cough, shortness of breath, or other known symptoms of COVID-19. Employees and guests who are exhibiting any of the symptoms of COVID-19 while at the property are instructed to immediately notify their manager (employees) or hotel security (guests).
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Here are some screenshots from the plan for guests at Wynn:

And some plans for inside the casino:

And for the pool:

And golf:

And this will be the procedure for screening guests for COVID-19:

So, I have some thoughts to share. It is interesting to see the depth of this plan. Nevada is working on the best way to reopen in a timely manner to get people back to Las Vegas and reopen the casinos. However, there does not appear to be a plan for "normal" operations. Those of you expecting "normal" Vegas when they reopen are going to be sorely disappointed. However, this is a workable solution, once the state has the means for wide-spread testing and tracking of the virus in the state.

Again, this is Maddox's plan, not the official plan of the State of Nevada. Will we see some of this implemented as the casinos reopen? Absolutely. Will it happen on Maddox's time schedule? Dunno. We still have to wait and see what the Governor says his plan is next week.

I'll have more for you later today, but wanted to get this published ASAP as I know it is of interest to all of us.

Sonya · Apr 19, 2020

I hope that some of you followed the link to see the full plan put forward by Maddox @ Wynn. It's a good plan. I like his optimism that they can start it mid-May, despite the troubles he mentions with testing. I guess we just keep waiting and seeing what happens. Oh, and sorry for posting that poker screen shot twice. Itchy insert finger, I guess.

So, in other news.

Please be very careful and verify stories before you repeat them. There are a lot of conspiracy theories out there about this virus. Some are familiar and ridiculous, but some have been gaining some traction, even in some prominent media circles.
https://news3lv.com/news/coronavirus/virus-fueled-conspiracy-theories-take-aim-at-hospitals

Alex Friedfeld, an investigative researcher for the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism, said quarantine conditions are ripe for conspiracy theories to mutate and quickly spread. The purveyors are scared and cooped up inside their homes with abundant free time to spend on the internet.

“We are in a time of crisis, so people are frightened,” he said. “They are looking for explanations. Conspiracy theories can be comforting because they basically place order on chaos. A lot of them give you somebody to blame, and that can be comforting to people at an uncertain time.”
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Other new conspiracy theories being fueled by the virus include one that claims maps show a link between 5G networks and coronavirus outbreaks. Another holds that Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates intends to use a COVID-19 vaccine to track and control the world's population. Fox News host Laura Ingraham amplified the narrative with an April 7 tweet that said, “Digitally tracking Americans’ every move has been a dream of the globalists for years.”

U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned Tuesday that COVID-19 misinformation is a poisonous threat to the world and urged social media organizations to do more to counter it.
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A copycat video posted on Twitter showed an empty parking lot and vacant tents outside University Medical Center Tucson in Arizona. “We should be picketing in protest of this hoax!” the user tweeted.

A hospital official said the exterior appears quiet because the medical center is not allowing visitors, has furloughed nonessential employees, canceled elective procedures and stopped using the tents to test outpatients with mild virus symptoms. Dr. Christian Bime, medical director of the intensive care unit at the Tucson hospital, said he has treated approximately 20 COVID-19 patients, some of whom have died.

“This is not a hoax. This is real. These are real patients who have real families,” Bime said.

A Mount Sinai spokeswoman says the lobby inside its Queen hospital appeared empty in the video because it also barred visitors. Another Twitter user posted a copycat video outside Mount Sinai's Manhattan hospital, which normally has about 970 patients but had approximately 1,250 on Wednesday. Around 700 were COVID-19 patients, including roughly 150 on ventilators, according to Reich. He called it “the worst crisis of our lifetimes.”

“There is so much obvious evidence that this is real. It almost defies imagination that anybody would have to try to prove it,” Reich said.
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I have to admit I chuckled a bit at this scoop from TMZ, but looks like Maddox's statement today proved it out.
TMZ warns that Vegas is going to look A LOT different when it reopens:
https://www.tmz.com/2020/04/18/las-vegas-plans-lifting-coronavirus-restrictions-reopen-casinos-spacing-sanitize-covid-19/

Las Vegas is looking into ways to lift coronavirus restrictions and safely reopen the world famous strip -- but it's gonna change your Vegas experience forever.

Our sources in Vegas tell TMZ ... when the casinos reopen, they will absolutely have different layouts and practices, and the biggest issues on the table are cleanliness and spacing.

We're told casinos will have to make sure gamblers don't get too close to one another, and that means spacing out people at table games like blackjack.

The strip sees about 115,000 revelers on an average day, so the risk for spreading the virus remains high while there's no vaccine. As a result, we're told officials' top priority is preventing a COVID-19 flare up.

Our sources say monumental sanitation efforts are being discussed for casinos -- machines will need to be cleaned more than ever before, and they'll need a system to sanitize playing chips, cards and dice -- the 3 surfaces gamblers touch the most.

We're told casino operators are working directly with government officials to hammer out a plan to lift restrictions and reopen the city -- but there are a lot of hurdles. For instance, our sources say they haven't even begun to tackle nightclubs.
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This article talks about Vegas not hosting the NFL Draft and the losses as a result:
https://www.cdcgamingreports.com/commentaries/without-the-nfl-draft-the-shuttered-las-vegas-strip-seems-even-emptier/

This week was the week that Las Vegas was going to be the center of the football universe.

But now, the legions of boisterous NFL fans that would have otherwise wandered the Strip wearing the caps and jerseys of their favorite teams have been replaced by silence.

The three-day 2020 NFL Draft was expected to bring hundreds of thousands of visitors to Las Vegas starting this Thursday. But when the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic closed casinos on the Strip, the NFL pulled the plug on the annual event, which traditionally attracts tens of thousands of football diehards.
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Las Vegas is taking a huge financial hit from the loss of the draft. Hotel rooms were selling for triple or even quadruple their normal late April value. Caesars Entertainment was to unveil the $375 million Caesars Forum conference center behind the Linq, which was to house the main stage, where the team’s selections were to be unveiled. The site was also to include the NFL Draft Experience, a free, three-day festival of all things football and all things NFL.

The Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority was ready to spend $2.4 million to produce and promote the NFL Draft, which was to include a red-carpet ceremony saluting the expected first-round selections on a stage set up in the middle of the Bellagio fountains. Following the ceremony, the players were to be paraded down the Strip to the Caesars Forum.

The event was also expected to celebrate the Las Vegas Raiders, as the team’s inaugural season in the $2 billion Allegiant Stadium is, at least for now, just four months away. NFL-licensed Las Vegas Raiders merchandise was to hit the market to coincide with the draft.
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A worker at CIRCA's construction site has tested positive for COVID-19
https://www.8newsnow.com/news/local-news/construction-worker-at-circa-resort-site-tests-positive-for-covid-19/

A construction worker at the Circa Resort and Casino site in downtown Las Vegas has tested positive for COVID-19.

Circa’s project team says they were notified about the worker testing positive on Thursday, April 16.

The worker is currently in isolation and will not return to work until cleared by their healthcare provider, Circa Resort said in a statement sent to 8 News Now.
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One thing I've been sort of glad to see in Las Vegas is the continuation of the construction projects. There have been some barriers out and around some of the properties with reports of something happening inside. And the continued work on the Stadium, Circa, Resorts World, etc will be draws to get people coming back to our favorite city when the time comes. But if these workers are not staying safe and able to distance, I'm afraid they will eventually be forced to shut down construction projects too. I hope it doesn't come to that.

Deadspin did a piece on what Vegas will look like when it reopens and the problems that they face.
https://deadspin.com/when-vegas-reopens-face-masks-will-be-a-nightmare-for-1842938187

With gaming and tourism in Las Vegas ventilated for a month and pressure mounting for the Strip to inch back toward life, the logistics seem imposing.

The risks of a botched Grand Reopening are easily imagined. Las Vegas’s economy is fundamentally tied to the population densities of its gambling rooms, hotels, nightclubs, and arenas, each of which is in turn bolstered by the city’s status as an international travel hub.

With no precautions, an infected-but-asymptomatic blackjack dealer at the Bellagio could conceivably spur a health crisis in Australia. A sick tourist could just as easily bring hell to Vegas.

This has not stopped an increasingly loud chorus of local officials from calling on Nevada Governor Steve Sisolak to lift the state’s shutdown orders.

Sisolak, to his credit, has remained firm, but the casino industry’s return to business in Nevada is inevitable. It is difficult to imagine, though, how politicians and gaming execs might hope to achieve that goal in the near future without a widespread embrace of masks, gloves, and other prophylactics — particularly in Las Vegas, given the city’s outsize set of risks.
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The benefits of a Las Vegas mask mandate would be twofold: It would first establish at least a minimum level of protection against outbreaks, while, crucially, enabling officials to cheaply deflect accusations of naked avarice.

Protective gear would, however, present a huge problem for law enforcement and casino security in the already notorious town. Crooks elsewhere have wasted no time in adapting to this new state of the world, using it to more effectively ply their trade.

Before the outbreak, casinos generally adhered to a longstanding and understandable policy of denying admittance to face-masked patrons. The logic is easy enough to unfurl: Groups of masked people can be intimidating, particularly to gamblers and tourists carrying large amounts of cash. Masks make identification more difficult, thereby making crime easier. Casinos would prefer to minimize the amount of crime taking place on their floors, and so banning face coverings has always seemed a slam-dunk choice. Until now.
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Cracks in the rationale underpinning “no mask” policies began to reveal themselves in March, as coronavirus panic was just getting underway, when staffers ordered an elderly couple to remove their surgical masks at a Washington casino. While this may only seem to be a one-off PR flub, security teams have a practical reason for the unyielding nature of this approach: Facial recognition software.

Casinos are arguably more reliant on facial recognition than any other private industry in the United States. The Strip has been using the technology since at least 1984. As much as 80% of security camera footage from a casino now goes unwatched by human eyes.
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Nevada Independent published a very interesting story from a historian, about the 1918 flu in Las Vegas.
https://thenevadaindependent.com/article/notes-on-the-1918-pandemic-in-las-vegas

Dr. S. L. Lee, who was in charge of the Nevada Board of Health in 1918, reported to the Legislature:

“It is difficult to determine the date of the appearance of the first case” of Spanish influenza, but “it spread rapidly throughout the State until there was scarcely a village or hamlet that did not pay toll to it in human life.”

Lee went on to say that while Spanish influenza was not one of the diseases that doctors were required to report to the state, “it is quite safe to say that there were from four to five thousand” cases in Nevada. He added, “In uncomplicated cases, the fatalities were few, but in those where pneumonia was contributory, the death rate was very high.”
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Spanish influenza hit Las Vegas the week of Sep. 23, 1918. The first public reporting appeared five days later, on Saturday, Sept. 28, in the Las Vegas Age, one of two local weekly newspapers.

Late in September, the Clark County Health Department reported that more than 10 people were identified as “suffering from an epidemic of influenza,” or “pneumonia.”
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By Oct. 5, 80 cases of influenza had been reported in Las Vegas alone, along with six cases of pneumonia associated with it.

A lack of initial understanding by the small Las Vegas medical community led to confusion in the community’s two weekly newspapers.
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On the morning of Nov. 4, the Las Vegas City Commission met in an emergency session and passed Ordinance 73. It stated that within the city limits everyone “Shall at all times and all places wear upon the face a mask.”

Immediately following passage of the ordinance, Clark County Red Cross workers were called in to make hundreds of masks. According to the Review, by nightfall “every person was supplied” with a mask.

The city called on every police officer to enforce the ordinance, which carried a fine of from $5 to $100 dollars.
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Not long after the citywide mask ordinance was in place, the Las Vegas Age reported that it was “being very faithfully obeyed by the people. As yet it is too early to determine whether or not the masking is effective as a preventative.” The newspaper also pointed out, “It is important that masks be worn, but this precaution is worse than useless unless the masks are sterilized frequently and kept clean.”

By then the city was considering using the high school building as a temporary hospital, “so that the small number of physicians and nurses may be able to better supervise the care of those who are sick.”
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The Age also published Health Officer Dr. Roy Martin’s 13-point outline entitled, “What to do if you have the symptoms” of the flu.

The recommendations included, “go to bed at once, do not wait,” and “be quiet and don’t worry.” The keys, according to Dr. Martin, were to “protect others by keeping away from them” along with disinfecting and sterilizing “articles from the sick room.”

“We are in the midst of an influenza epidemic which has been sweeping the country for several weeks,” said Martin. “It must be controlled or a great loss of life will result. The public must co-operate and observe the regulations of the health department or little will be accomplished.”

“Fear only when you have not done your duty to yourself and fellow man,” Dr. Martin was also quoted as saying. His instructions for those who were not sick included:

· Assist in preventing gatherings and crowds.

· Do not stand close to or directly in front of one while talking.

· Insist on isolation of people with symptoms of influenza.

· Wear a mask as required by the order of the City Commissioners.

· Clean out, clean up and keep clean inside and out, personally and otherwise.

· Brush your teeth, gargle your throat and spray your nose with antiseptic solution.

· Beware of “sure cures.”
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On the 11th hour of the 11 day of the 11th month of 1918, World War I came to an end.

Five days later, on the 16th of November, Las Vegas Age, page one:

“Influenza continues taking death toll”
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As public connections were relaxing, health officials were still concerned about a second wave.

During the week of Dec. 16, the Clark County Health Board issued an order “prohibiting all public dances until further order, on account of the influenza situation.”

The county board said, “Dances are a particularly dangerous form of amusement at this time. The overexertion, the violent exercise, heating the person and causing perspiration, the tendency to exposure, all contribute conditions which are most inviting to influenza and which might easily arouse the scourge again to full activity.”
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The answers to the 1918 pandemic: quarantine those who are sick, wear a mask, practice social distancing, and close public meeting places.
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Really, these quotes don't do it justice. It's not a terribly long read, you should make some time for it. After all, as they say, history doesn't repeat itself, it rhymes.

Just a couple more, not Nevada specific things.

Polling does not seem to indicate people are ready to leave their isolation.
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/04/19/poll-coronavirus-restrictions-194377

According to an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll released Sunday, 58 percent of registered voters expressed concern about a loosening of restrictions, compared with 32 percent who worried that the restrictions would stay in place for too long. Three percent said they were concerned about both scenarios.
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The poll also indicated increased concern that the coronavirus would have a direct personal impact: Thirty-three percent said they were “very worried” the coronavirus would strike a family member, while an additional 40 percent said they were “somewhat worried.” Those numbers are up from 15 percent and 38 percent, respectively, in a poll released March 20.

A mere 3 percent said the pandemic had no impact on their lives, compared with 77 percent who said it had affected them either in “a very major way” or “a fairly major way.”
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Propublica put out an interesting piece called Coronavirus Advice from Abroad: 7 Lessons Governors should not ignore:
https://www.propublica.org/article/coronavirus-advice-from-abroad-7-lessons-americas-governors-should-not-ignore-as-they-reopen-their-economies
They take some swipes at Trump in the start of the article, but skip that to get to the good stuff that matters.

To help you and your aides think about this decision over the next few weeks, we’ve interviewed experts and frontline officials from Italy, Germany, Spain, Singapore, Taiwan and South Korea. While they differ on the details, their views formed a startlingly united consensus of what’s needed:

Massive, ongoing testing to detect where the disease is spreading,

a real-time ability to trace contacts of those infected and isolate them,

a willingness of people to wear masks in crowded public spaces,

reserves of personal protective equipment (PPE) and other equipment for hospital workers to handle any surge in cases,

and reliable, easily administered blood tests to find out the number of people who have been infected. If they work well, such tests could eventually be used to identify people with immunity who could work at higher-risk jobs.

We also asked American experts whether states can meet all or most of these benchmarks. Their answers coalesced around a single point: None of you are close to being ready.
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One theme emerged again and again. Experts from across the world said it’s crucial to correctly interpret the recent drop in the rate of hospitalizations and deaths reported by New York City, ground zero for the epidemic. This result was achieved only by a month of slamming the brakes on the economy and banning the most basic interactions (and pleasures) of human society.
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Reopening is essential to save the economy, they said, but don’t kid yourself: The new normal will look nothing like the old normal. Until there’s a vaccine or a reliable treatment, you and your states will be living and working very differently, constantly at risk from a wave of disease that could overwhelm your hospitals. You may borrow ideas from Asia and Europe that would have been unimaginable a few months ago: Isolating infected people from their families in hotels, requiring masks for everyone on a bus or subway, ordering restaurants to seat people at every other table, limiting certain jobs to people who have proven immunity to the virus.

“We have to all acknowledge that we will have to live with Corona for at least a year and probably two or three years,” said Dr. Ansgar Lohse, a professor at University Medical Center in Hamburg and co-author of a paper that sets out a “flexible, risk-adjusted strategy” for reopening commerce in Germany.
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The steps break down as follows. Each has a section to detail what is required.

Build an army of contact tracers.

Be prepared to test constantly.

Isolate people with suspected infections from their family.

Protect, protect, protect health care workers.

Normal is not the goal.

Keep your eyes peeled for the Second Wave.

Clear Communication is critical.

And lastly, I wanted to offer up this excellent piece from Science Magazine. It's not an easy read, but it provides a very good picture of why you don't want to get this or have anyone you know or care about get it.

How does coronavirus kill? Clinicians trace a ferocious rampage through the body, from brain to toes
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/04/how-does-coronavirus-kill-clinicians-trace-ferocious-rampage-through-body-brain-toes#

On rounds in a 20-bed intensive care unit (ICU) one recent day, physician Joshua Denson assessed two patients with seizures, many with respiratory failure and others whose kidneys were on a dangerous downhill slide. Days earlier, his rounds had been interrupted as his team tried, and failed, to resuscitate a young woman whose heart had stopped. All shared one thing, says Denson, a pulmonary and critical care physician at the Tulane University School of Medicine. “They are all COVID positive.”

As the number of confirmed cases of COVID-19 surges past 2.2 million globally and deaths surpass 150,000, clinicians and pathologists are struggling to understand the damage wrought by the coronavirus as it tears through the body. They are realizing that although the lungs are ground zero, its reach can extend to many organs including the heart and blood vessels, kidneys, gut, and brain.
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What follows is a snapshot of the fast-evolving understanding of how the virus attacks cells around the body, especially in the roughly 5% of patients who become critically ill. Despite the more than 1000 papers now spilling into journals and onto preprint servers every week, a clear picture is elusive, as the virus acts like no microbe humanity has ever seen. Without larger, prospective controlled studies that are only now being launched, scientists must pull information from small studies and case reports, often published at warp speed and not yet peer reviewed. “We need to keep a very open mind as this phenomenon goes forward,” says Nancy Reau, a liver transplant physician who has been treating COVID-19 patients at Rush University Medical Center. “We are still learning.”
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I'm not going to quote a bunch of the article, you can read it if you're interested.

This map of the devastation that COVID-19 can inflict on the body is still just a sketch. It will take years of painstaking research to sharpen the picture of its reach, and the cascade of cardiovascular and immune effects it might set in motion. As science races ahead, from probing tissues under microscopes to testing drugs on patients, the hope is for treatments more wily than the virus that has stopped the world in its tracks.
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That's it for this weekend. I know that we're all tired of this virus, but I think we all need to get adjusted to the idea that even "normal" isn't going to feel like normal for a long time with this virus around. Until we have a vaccine, or it runs its course, it is going to be lurking out there waiting for us to come out and get infected, or infect others. Please be smart and safe.

Sonya · Apr 20, 2020

This week we are hoping to get the plan for reopening from the Governor. No idea when or if it will come, but I'll get it up here as soon as I can.

Opening Up America Leave Casinos Speculating Where They Fit
https://www.cdcgamingreports.com/opening-up-america-guidelines-leave-casino-industry-speculating-where-it-fits/

The nationwide shutdown of nearly 1,000 casinos in 43 states in response to the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic was not entirely uniform. The closures were spaced out over nearly two weeks, and were largely mandated by governors, state gaming regulators, and tribal governments. In some instances, casino operators, such as Wynn Resorts and MGM Resorts International, made their own decisions to close properties before the orders came down.

The state-by-state casino re-openings will not be identical, either.
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Joel Simkins, the head of gaming and leisure investment banking for SunTrust Robinson Humphrey, believes regional gaming markets, such as the Midwest and South, have a quicker path to reopening than destination gaming markets, such as the Strip and Atlantic City.

“As stay-in-place and social distancing measures start to ease, we expect consumers will gradually be willing to venture out and get back to their favorite pastimes,” Simkins, a former equity research analyst wrote in a report provided last week to gaming industry CEOs, CFOs, and other industry insiders.

“It will be far easier for consumers to jump in their cars and gamble versus hopping on a plane,” he wrote. “We aren’t epidemiologists and think it’s unwise to play the role of armchair expert in trying to prognosticate when business will return to ‘normal’ and what that means for a top line.”
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“The burden on employers is going to be significant and will likely require gaming operators to not only check their employees’ health but those of guests as they return to both regional and strip operations,” Bussmann said. “They are also going to have an increase in their housekeeping costs in terms of personnel and product once they are allowed to reopen.”
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Bussmann said the reopening of the Strip will have its own phased-in approach.

“Demand will not be where it was at the beginning of March, as tourists (will) want to know it is safe to come to Vegas either by car or flying into McCarran (International Airport),” Bussmann said.
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GLPI has completed the purchase of Tropicana Las Vegas
https://www.cdcgamingreports.com/glpi-completes-acquisition-of-the-tropicana-las-vegas-penn-will-still-operate-the-resort/

Gaming and Leisure Properties completed its purchase of the Tropicana Las Vegas Monday, but Penn National will still operate in the Strip resort when the property reopens once Nevada’s governor mandated casino closures are lifted.

The real estate investment trust, however, said the 1,500-room Rat Pack era casino and its 34-acre site will remain on the market.
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The transaction gives Penn some financial breathing room as all 41 of the company’s casinos in 19 states have been closed in an effort to slow the spread of the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic. Penn had been trying to sell the Tropicana since last year. Penn will continue to operate the property for two years under a lease agreement until the Tropicana is sold. The agreement includes three one-year extensions at GLPI’s option.
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MIT Technology Review says that we need to seriously ramp up testing if we plan to open businesses this summer.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/04/20/1000228/the-us-will-need-to-do-20-million-tests-a-day-to-reopen-safely/

A group of experts has produced a plan for the US to reopen its economy safely this summer. However, it’s contingent on doing at least 20 million tests every day, scaling up contact tracing, and ensuring that those who need to isolate can be properly supported.

The report, produced by 45 cross-disciplinary experts assembled by Harvard University’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, says we need to be doing 5 million tests a day by early June in order to start reopening the country, increasing to 20 million by midsummer to fully end the shutdown. From the start, the World Health Organization has said the only way to beat the virus is to “test, test, test.” That message seems to finally be getting through.

How we get there: The level of testing needed depends on our being able to effectively trace the contacts of those infected with coronavirus, warn those people they’ve been exposed, test them, and isolate everyone who tests positive, the report says. We’d need to provide job protection and support for those who have to isolate, including food deliveries and care packages. That involves hiring an army of contact tracers—at least another 100,000 people.

It also requires us to massively scale up testing by incentivizing the private sector to create new solutions at speed, the authors say. This could be coordinated by a Pandemic Testing Board set up by the federal government and given the task of securing the needed testing supplies and infrastructure. This program would be expensive: $50 to 300 billion over two years. However, the report authors say, it is dwarfed by the economic cost of continued collective quarantine: $100 to 350 billion every month.
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The benefits of this approach: Implementing a lockdown does not “beat” the virus—effectively it just hits pause on its spread until we’re able to come up with a way to treat it or reduce the number of cases to the point where they’re traceable. This plan would avoid the need for endless cycles of opening up then shutting down the economy until we find a vaccine.
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Ken Adams has a good article about the closing of the Lakeside Inn in Tahoe in CDC Gaming
https://www.cdcgamingreports.com/commentaries/and-the-first-one-bites-the-dust/

The Lakeside, with 13 table games and 314 slot machines, was already the smallest and weakest property in the market, more vulnerable than the others to snowstorms, increased competition or any other change in conditions. Clearly, the COVID-19 crisis, and the concomitant shutdown of all the casinos in Nevada, created one of those conditions. It is not the only small casino that has been forced to close during the pandemic, of course; every casino in the country is currently closed, and many are in positions that are just as precarious. For a time, it appeared that the federal relief efforts would offer a lifeline. However, the rules of the Small Business Administration expressly prohibit a business that derives the majority of its income from gambling from receiving any support. That had been the last hope for the Lakeside Inn. In recent articles online about the property, there has been a lot of blame directed at management for not having done better, saved more and been more efficient. That is somewhat unfair. Like all small casinos, the Lakeside Inn was challenged by the current situation, and operating a small casino is a difficult juggling act even in the best of times.
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Dr Fauci has some words of caution for opening up too soon:
https://www.8newsnow.com/news/the-latest-fauci-says-reopening-too-quickly-will-backfire/

He added on ABC’s “Good Morning America” that “unless we get the virus under control, the real recovery economically is not gonna happen. So what you do if you jump the gun and go into a situation where you have a big spike, you’re gonna set yourself back.”

Fauci says as painful as it is to follow guidelines of gradually phasing into a reopening “it’s gonna backfire. That’s the problem.”
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The World Series of Poker at Rio has been postponned until Fall, date to be determined
https://www.wsop.com/news/2020/Apr/12325/2020-WORLD-SERIES-OF-POKER-POSTPONED.html

The 51st running of the World Series of Poker (WSOP), set to begin Tuesday, May 26 from the Rio All-Suite Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas is officially being postponed as a result of the public health emergency involving COVID-19. It is now targeted for fall of 2020, with exact dates and events to be determined.

“We are committed to running the World Series of Poker this year but need additional time to proceed on our traditional scale while prioritizing guest and staff well-being,” said Ty Stewart, Executive Director of the World Series of Poker. “In the interim, official WSOP competitions are expected to be played online this summer, and we will soon announce details of an expanded series of tournaments to be played on WSOP.com and through partnership with international operators, which will allow players to chase WSOP glory from their homes.”
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Washoe County says they believe they are at or near the peak of infections in their county
https://thenevadaindependent.com/article/peak-may-be-past-for-washoe-county-but-health-officials-anticipate-need-for-major-ramp-up-in-testing-investigators

Washoe County health officials said Monday that they think it’s likely that they’ve passed the peak of cases, but that it’s going to take many more staff members and much more testing to handle the additional spread of the coronavirus that’s likely to come once the economy starts reopening.

Washoe County District Health Officer Kevin Dick said at a virtual press conference his agency is working with others in the public health community to assess the testing capacity it will need once nonessential businesses are allowed to operate again.

“I think we know that what we have available now is not sufficient,” he said. “I could tell you that would mean that we would have to at least double, maybe triple or more, that capacity of the testing that we’re doing.”
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“There’s a huge task ahead of us, and we’re working to start to plan and figure out how we’re going to establish that,” he said. “CDC is talking about sending out … more of their people in the field, but I don’t think CDC is going to solve this problem for us.”
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That's all I've got for today. Thanks for reading. I hope this information is helpful to someone.

Sonya · Apr 22, 2020

Lots of stuff for you today.

First, Life is Beautiful has been cancelled for 2020.
https://www.fox5vegas.com/more/life-is-beautiful-2020-canceled-due-to-covid-19-concerns/article_363a98ee-8424-11ea-8b5b-8f3a68dbf96d.html

The 3-day experience, originally slated for September 18-20, was shutdown due to the health and safety of eventgoers, according to the release.

"Nothing would make us happier than to gather with you this September, but given these unprecedented times we can no longer move forward with the Life Is Beautiful festival in 2020," organizers said in the post. "Our hearts are heavy, but our resilience is unstoppable."
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And on a related note:

Healthcare expert predicts concerts and festivals will not return until autumn 2021
https://www.nme.com/news/music/coronavirus-healthcare-expert-predicts-concerts-and-festivals-will-not-return-until-autumn-2021-2645626

In a recent roundtable discussion, hosted and transcribed by the New York Times, bioethicist and professor of healthcare management Zeke Emanuel says he has “no idea” how promoters that are rescheduling arts and music events for later this year “think that’s a plausible possibility”.
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“Larger gatherings – conferences, concerts, sporting events – when people say they’re going to reschedule this conference or graduation event for October 2020, I have no idea how they think that’s a plausible possibility. I think those things will be the last to return,” Emmanuel said in the video conference.

“Realistically we’re talking fall 2021 at the earliest.”
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South Point Hotel/Casino to furlough most employees, indefinitely.
https://www.fox5vegas.com/coronavirus/south-point-in-las-vegas-to-furlough-most-employees-indefinitely/article_c169e436-834f-11ea-8bc2-fb8ee59f19d6.html

The South Point Hotel and Casino has announced it will begin furloughing most of its staff on May 3 "for an indefinite period" as a result of the property's closure due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

According to a statement from the property, the South Point will maintain workers' health benefits through July 31. The company says it will cover health payroll insurance deductions through that time.

Once the property reopens, workers will be brought back based on demand, the statement said.
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William Hill CEO talks sports betting outlook, casinos & return to normalcy
https://www.playusa.com/casino-gaming-betting-normalcy-in-time-says-william-hill-ceo/

The US gambling industry finds itself in uncharted territory. All professional and collegiate sports are on hiatus. Every single commercial casino (and most tribal properties) around the country has closed, causing a wave of unemployed workers. When historians look back at these few months a decade from now, they will refer to it as a period of uncertainty.
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“Over time, I don’t have any doubt gaming comes back to where it was. I don’t think this is a long term structural issue for the industry,” Asher said to PlayUSA. “I just think it’s going to take us a while, broadly speaking, to get back where we were just even a month ago.”
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“I think sports betting will come back pretty strongly. When you talk about gaming, there are different aspects. I think this is going to be a tough year, at least in Las Vegas, because it’s going to be a while before you see the convention business resume and people getting on airplanes to fly out here. But I think sports betting will come back pretty quickly once the games get going again,” Asher said.
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In his assessment, Asher said operators must determine if they should open all properties at once or should they consolidate operations in the short term. But most importantly, he said at the top of the list is how you accomplish all this safely.

“Nobody wants to be in a situation where you, your employees, or your customers, are at risk. Everybody will have to be comfortable from a safety perspective,” he said. “From the outset, I’ve been saying we have a public health crisis and a business crisis going on in the country. There is only so much you can do on the business side until you solve the public health issue. That has to be addressed first.”

It’s going to be an enormous task to ensure 649,000 gaming employees spread across 973 casinos return to work safely. It will be another to recoup the $43.5 billion in economic activity that most certainly will be lost.
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The Nevada Assembly Republican Caucus put out their plan for opening the casinos and it isn't to just throw open all the doors and invite tourists back to Vegas.
http://www.mynevada.gop/the-time-is-now-to-start-the-process-of-reopening-nevada/
The primary complaint seems to be that Sisolak hasn't put out a plan for reopening, but nobody seems to have more than loose ideas. Here are theirs.

Framework to Reopen Nevada

Join the California, Oregon and Washington Western States Pact

Governor Sisolak should join the Western States Pact and work with our regional partners on best practices to mitigate the spread and economic impact of the coronavirus.

Establish a regional plan to modify and/or ease Nevada’s stay at home orders

Follow guidelines from the President’s Coronavirus Guidelines for America and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommendations.

Plan should be based on increased testing capabilities and assurances of hospital readiness.

Continue to adhere to public health guidelines that include practicing good hygiene, environmental cleanliness and sanitation, implementing social distancing, and working from home if possible.

Immediately establish a bi-partisan taskforce to advise on a strategy to re-open Nevada

Include healthcare officials, business stakeholders, and a bi-partisan group of lawmakers.

Set a safe, gradual and phased opening plan based on the President’s Coronavirus Guidelines for America and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommendations.

Establish strict business and employee guidelines for re-opening businesses.

Immediately establishing a curbside pickup model that will allow non-essential retail businesses to open

Examples include pickup, delivery by mail, or delivery to the customer’s doorstep in strict compliance with the President’s Coronavirus Guidelines for America and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommendations.

Continue to adhere to public health guidelines that include practicing good hygiene, environmental cleanliness and sanitation, implementing social distancing, and working from home if possible.

As unemployment continues to soar and businesses struggle to keep employees on payroll, Nevadans are looking at their leaders for hope and guidance. The health and safety of Nevada families is paramount, but so is their livelihood and ability to provide for their families.
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The problem with all of these plans is that Nevada does not yet meet the first requirement of the Administration plan to reopen, there has not been a decline in cases for 14 days. Most states are not at that benchmark, but are feeling political pressure to reopen soon.

There was a teleconference with Reps Lee and Horsford, along with Chamber of Commerce members from different ethnic groups, and their concern is widespread testing availability
https://www.nevadacurrent.com/2020/04/20/lee-horsford-business-leaders-stress-importance-of-testing-to-reopening-businesses/

U.S. Reps. Susie Lee and Steven Horsford say increased testing for COVID-19 is needed in order to ensure businesses can safely open back up.
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“We are determined to fight to open up our economy in a science-based, safe manner,” Lee said. “That means we need to focus on testing and making sure that testing becomes more and more widespread. We’re nowhere close. We are one-fifth of where we need to be in terms of providing testing.”

Horsford added no one wants business to be closed, but it is a necessity to prevent the further spread of the virus and to continue to promote social distancing.

“It’s either six feet apart or six feet underground, those are our options right now,” Horsford said.
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“This is going to be a long process,” Lee said. “I would love to say we’re going to turn a switch in two weeks and things are going to be over. It’s not. It’s a whack-a-mole process. We’re going to start to open up the economy, you’re probably going to see some additional outbreak and then you’re going to see an additional clamp down. We need to continue to fight and make sure we get every resource into getting the proper testing.”

Had the federal government made testing a priority and the president accepted testing recommendations made by the World Health Organization, Lee argued there might not have been the shutdown to the extent we’ve seen.

“Had we had adequate testing from the beginning, we would have been able to do the type of tracking necessary,” she added. “That’s water under the bridge. We have to move forward and that’s why we are asking for more money for testing.”
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And here is another article about the need to ramp up testing in Nevada before they can reopen.
https://thenevadaindependent.com/article/public-health-experts-caution-not-enough-resources-to-test-trace-covid-19-patients-as-nevada-eyes-reopening-economy

Nearly 40,000 tests for the novel coronavirus have been performed in Nevada over the last month and a half, but to safely begin reopening portions of the economy, the Silver State may need to be running that many tests each day.

A new Harvard University report produced by 45 experts across several different disciplines estimates the country needs to be running 5 million COVID-19 tests a day by early June to begin allowing some businesses to reopen; to fully open the economy, it will need to run 20 million tests a day by late July. Extrapolating those numbers out to each state by population, Nevada will need to run 47,000 tests a day by early June and 188,000 tests by late July.
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While there haven’t been any projections looking specifically at how many tests should, ideally, be run each day in Nevada, public health experts, health care providers and other scientists agree that the number of tests being run in the state isn’t enough. Over the last week, Nevada reported an average of about 920 new people tested each day.
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“I think we know that what we have available now is not sufficient,” said Washoe County District Health Officer Kevin Dick on a press call with reporters on Monday. “I could tell you that would mean that we would have to at least double, maybe triple or more, that capacity of the testing that we’re doing.”
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And that doesn't address the need for contact tracing of people who test positive:

But testing is only half the battle. Even if there were enough tests available for every close contact of every positive patient, the state and local health agencies still would need enough staff to be able to find all of those contacts and make sure they get tested. By all accounts, the local health districts are far from having enough staff to implement that kind of a robust testing and surveillance operation.

Dick has estimated that Washoe County will need about 140 people to do full-time contact tracing, when the health district right now has fewer than 160 full-time employees in any position. He said that the CDC has talked about sending their staff into the field, but said it was unlikely that the federal agency would be able to solve the staffing shortages.

“In our future scenarios, once we are reducing the social distancing requirements, we’re reopening additional businesses, et cetera, that will increase the potential for the spread of the disease, and therefore it becomes even more important that we’re able to very quickly identify positive COVID-19 cases to have those individuals isolated, to identify their close contacts, and have those individuals quarantine for that 14-day incubation period as soon as possible to prevent the additional spread,” Dick said. “That’s going to take additional resources.”

The Southern Nevada Health District is in a similar situation. Health district officials estimate that they have about 50 people from their Office of Epidemiology and Disease Surveillance working on contact tracing, in addition to others who have been pulled in from other roles to assist.

“As you might imagine, we’re really overwhelmed with the amount of contract contact tracing that we have to do,” said Michael Johnson, director of the health district’s community health division. “We, like many other health departments around the country, are really in need of additional disease investigators to keep up with all the contact tracing.”
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And here is more from the Governor's Health Advisory Team on reopening:
https://www.nevadacurrent.com/2020/04/21/nevada-not-even-ready-to-discuss-broad-reopening-say-governors-medical-experts/

With new cases of COVID-19 still rising and protesters clamoring for Gov. Steve Sisolak to loosen the virus’ stranglehold on the state’s economy, the governor’s medical experts say Nevada lacks the “bare essentials” that would warrant even a discussion of reopening.

“I get it. I want my life back to normal,” says Dr. Shabada Asad, a member of the governor’s Medical Advisory Team and director of Infectious Disease at UMC, who cautions that relaxing social distancing rules would give Nevadans “a false sense of freedom” that could be lethal.

“I feel their anger and frustration and in many cases it’s desperation, and I get that, but I’m very scared about what will happen if the city opens and there’s this resurgence,” she said.

The economic and physical well-being of more than 3 million Nevadans relies in part on the advice of the five-member team of doctors and scientists making recommendations to Sisolak on how to reopen the state’s economy at the earliest possible time without reigniting the outbreak.
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“It will be really looking at more essential services or almost-essential services,” Larson says. “As he puts his plans together he consults with us. What we look at is what industries will have the fewest people congregating or needing to be in close contact. So this will be gradual. Very gradual.”

Larson is predicting some reopenings in late May, but admits it may be “wishful thinking.”
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It remains unknown when casinos will reopen. Personal grooming services such as haircuts, manicures, and pedicures are not even almost-essential, says Larson, and will have to wait.

And at this point, a big-screen TV may be your best bet for watching the Las Vegas Raiders’ inaugural home game, if pro football has a season.

“Realistically speaking, I don’t think that’s going to be possible,” Asad says of fans packing Allegiant Stadium for an August kick-off. “A lot changes in four months but right now, August seems too close. I hate to be a pessimist, but it doesn’t seem too realistic right now.”
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“We’re trying our best,” Asad says of Nevada’s innovative efforts by Dr. Mark Pandori of the Nevada State Public Health Lab and others to piece together testing kits. “What do you do when you’re told you’re on your own? You make do with what you have and that’s what we’re trying to do.”

The phased plan for reopening calls for rigorous contact tracing, a labor- intensive process usually performed by public health officials that involves identifying and testing the close contacts of a person who tests positive.

“The Southern Nevada Health District does not have the manpower,” says Asad, citing estimates that 100,000 people may be required to conduct tracing in the U.S. “It’s the same for public health districts throughout the country.”

She says the prospect of contact tracing today is “impossible” and that new cases must be reduced to a manageable level.

“If we got to the point where we are seeing fewer and fewer new cases identified, public health officials can catch up and do the contact tracing more effectively,” she says.

New cases in Nevada are rising at the rate of about 100 each day, but have begun to plateau.
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“We have canceled all our elective procedures. That is a crisis standard of care. People have to go back to normal and the capacity of our hospital has to go back to where we’d have the manpower, the medication, and the equipment that we could deal with a surge in patients,” she said. “It’s only when these requirements are met that we can begin to talk about when to open the city.”

“There are no sides in this battle,” says Asad. “We are all on one side. There are people who are working to make this happen in the fastest but safest way possible.”
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This Las Vegas pulmunologist is preparing for treating people who had Coronavirus, after they leave the hospital.
https://www.ktnv.com/news/coronavirus/las-vegas-pulmonologist-prepares-for-wave-of-patients-in-recovery

For those who catch COVID-19, their road to recovery could be long and challenging, even after they leave the hospital.

Dr. George Tu with the Lung Center of Nevada has been taking care of patients and their lungs for decades.

"I've been through SARS, I've been through H1N1," said Tu. "[COVID-19] is certainly broader in terms of severity and unpredictability."
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The new respiratory virus can cause a range of breathing problems even after patients leave the hospital.

"Most of the time they come in with a chronic cough, what's called a post-infectious cough," said Tu. "That's the most common symptom we see."

Tu says some may patients may even need to be put on oxygen for several months, and those are just the patients who come to him. Others may experience PTSD, anxiety, even cognitive issues. Dr. Tu says with COVID-19, a patient's road to recovery doesn't end when they leave the hospital.
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Here's another article about Clark County's plans for ramping up testing:
https://www.nevadacurrent.com/blog/testing-for-covid-19-to-skyrocket-in-next-month-says-clark-county/

“We, as a community, are unique,” Kirkpatrick said, noting Southern Nevada relies on 52 million tourists to power its economy. “Before we can have any large events in our community we need to have the ability to test in case we need to. No one wants to open the doors tomorrow and turn around and close them in 30 days. Patience is important.”

“We want to do this methodically,” she said. “We support our governor 100 percent. It’s our obligation to open the Las Vegas Strip and to do it right. I don’t believe businesses are in a hurry to open up just to go backward.”
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Governor Sisolak had a meeting where he discussed reopening businesses, and announced schools are closed for the year and will continue with distance learning.
https://thenevadaindependent.com/article/sisolak-says-business-reopenings-can-begin-when-state-meets-health-benchmarks-schools-to-stay-closed

Gov. Steve Sisolak will extend the state’s shutdown order to an as-yet undetermined date and close schools for the rest of the academic year, but he will allow some businesses to reopen if the state sees a consistent downward trajectory of COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations.

Sisolak announced the framework for reopening the state’s shuttered economy at a press conference in Carson City on Tuesday, 10 days before the current shutdown orders are expected to lapse. It largely follows a White House guidance of assessing infection and hospitalization rates preceding an initial “Phase 1” of business reopenings.

“We now want to move into a phase where saving lives and restarting our economy are not mutually exclusive,” he said.
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State officials say they plan to launch Phase 1 once they have observed 14 days of “consistent and sustainable” downward trends in the number of COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations. Experts say it probably won’t be clear for a few days if Nevada is on a downward slope, and that it’s likely the emergency directives will need to be extended beyond April 30.

“We’ll be working to provide graphing material, as we move forward, and to be as transparent as we can,” Sisolak said, adding that he hopes to give people advance notice about when the state is turning a corner and businesses can start reopening.
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“It’s going to be a gradual process,” he said. “You don’t run the marathon the first time out, you’ve got to start and proceed slowly. We’re going to go in phases.”

The governor said he did not want to predict any reopening date at this point in time, but said the state needed to remain “flexible” on picking any reopening date.

“This is atypical,” he said. “The reopening needs to be flexible, because it’s going to rely on data, and this is a virus. There’s going to have some real time decision making, if we see a spike in cases.”

Health officials also want to ensure there is enough capacity to treat patients without implementing “Crisis Standards of Care” — a triage plan that guides how health care workers should prioritize patients if they are too overwhelmed to take care of everyone.
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State officials are also planning to issue industry-specific safety guidance to businesses that will be allowed to open in Phase 1. It wasn’t immediately clear what industries would be included in that first group, or if physical state offices would be part of the cohort.

Any plans for casinos reopening would have to be approved by the Gaming Control Board, for one, Sisolak said.
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Sisolak also declined to give additional details as to whether or not Nevada would join a Western states compact between California, Oregon and Washington to jointly strategize and plan COVID-19 response, but said he supports governors in those three states and hinted “you’ll be hearing more about that as we get a little later into the week.”
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In Vegas Gonna Vegas news, strip clubs are making their case for Federal Coronavirus Aid:
https://lasvegassun.com/news/2020/apr/21/las-vegas-strip-clubs-make-case-for-federal-corona/

Like business operators throughout the Las Vegas Valley, Jason Mohney is trying to figure out how to support his employees amid the COVID-19 outbreak.

But unlike many, he’s facing a disadvantage in obtaining emergency funding from the federal government. Mohney is in the strip club business, which Congress lumps into a category of operations of a “prurient sexual nature” that have mostly been frozen out of the $2 trillion federal Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act.

The distinction is discriminatory toward a class of workers who perform a legal and legitimate service for the public, Mohney said, which is why he filed a lawsuit last week against the Small Business Administration, SBA Administrator Jovita Carranza and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin on behalf of his company, Little Darlings in Flint, Mich., which operates 200 exotic dance clubs in Las Vegas and several other cities.

"We haven't been denied, just not given fair or consistent opportunities," Mohney said, referencing some clubs that were told their loan wouldn't be forgiven. "Some other clubs have been flat-out denied."
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I wasn't going to include this, because it's on MSNBC, which some of you do not consider a reliable source. However, it's video and it's spreading to larger national outlets and it does not make Las Vegas look great to the tourists who are going to be needed to bring back business in the tourist corridors of Nevada. The video is available at the bottom of this article.
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/watch-vegas-mayor-advocate-survival-of-the-fittest-reopening-strategy-987957/

The Independent mayor made wild health assertions while making her case for a reopening of Vegas during an interview with MSNBC’s Katy Tur, saying, “What I assume is that everybody is a coronavirus carrier — that 100% of our population is asymptomatic, but a carrier.” Goodman continued, “My whole opinion is: get our people back to work.”
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Mayor Carolyn Goodman has been vocal in her opposition to the closure of the casinos. But anyone with any familiarity with Public Relations would say this is not the way to get your message out successfully.

“I am making the assumption that everybody’s a carrier. So let’s go forward, open up the city, open up whoever wants to but do it in a very responsible, cautious way,” Goodman said.

The mayor then talked again about protecting seniors and children but doesn’t say how she would accomplish it. But there’s a reason for that, and it’s because her reasoning turns more sinister.

Goodman said, ”Assume everybody is a carrier. And then you start from an even slate. And tell the people what to do. And let the businesses open and competition will destroy that business if, in fact, they become evident that they have disease, they’re closed down. It’s that simple.”

Tur, sounding rather stunned, ended the interview there saying, “That’s a modern-day survival of the fittest that you are laying out in Las Vegas.”

Not only is Goodman’s “everyone is a carrier” assumption preposterous because if everyone is a carrier than no one else can catch it. More importantly, she’s literally advocating for businesses to restart on the premise that a death rate will be a measurement of success — like some kind of mass human experiment. And although Goodman does not have the power to enact any of these changes, the ease in which she expresses them is terrifying, to say the least.
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Nevada news fixture, Jon Ralson, has an opinion article about Sisolak's press conference. It's complicated.
https://thenevadaindependent.com/article/time-for-the-end-of-the-beginning

With experts arrayed around him in Carson City, Gov. Steve Sisolak directed a scripted hour-long news conference Tuesday that was a play without a denouement, a movie that faded to black without a climax. It had, like the pandemic itself, a beginning and middle, but no end.

I understand the governor’s dilemma: Sisolak was among the earliest to shut down his state, and he wants to be methodical and careful when re-opening so as to not let the coronavirus resurge, perhaps crushing the economy even more than it already has been. It’s not simply a trade-off between saving lives and saving the economy; people are still going to get sick and die no matter when life returns to some version of normal.

But even though I sympathize with the agonizing decision the governor has to make, I don’t think he fully realizes how the pressure has been building for him to take a firmer approach again, as he did a month ago, and not appear to be a passive observer absorbing the opinions of experts. I am not saying he should succumb to the nattering nabobs, but messaging is important here and only Sisolak can give a battered populace hope that helpful guidance is on the way.
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I was surprised. Sure, the governor didn’t set a definite re-opening date or even give any idea of one. And when pressed by reporters, he deferred to others, said he would make decisions based on the best available data on whether the curve had flattened enough.

It made sense. As I wrote on Twitter, “Anyone who runs a biz (looks in mirror) wants to know when light at the end of the tunnel is sunshine. But I also get the gov’s side: he doesn’t want the light to be a train. Wants more data. Tough deal.”

Sometimes, though, as I have come to realize after three and a half decades of observing politics, you have to expand your field of vision. What may have seemed to some like a chief executive listening to a smart group of health and economic wonks may have seemed to others as only more uncertainty.

Maybe the discussion put on display last night would have been fine for the meeting before the news conference, the bandying about of ideas and information before the man at the helm decides what to do. Instead, my guess is too many people saw it as a decision not to decide when they wanted more guidance, more specificity, more…hope.
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In the absence of the governor’s voice, people will begin to listen to whatever voice is the loudest. They will choose sound bites over sound decision-making. That is a clear and present danger for the governor.

It’s easy for many of these people to sit on the sidelines and throw rocks – I have been doing it for 35 years myself – without the responsibility of having to make what often seems like Hobsons’ choices. But Sisolak no longer has that luxury.

The governor shouldn’t bow to external pressure to act precipitously. Whatever he does has to have flexibility because the virus will not be cooperative.

But at some point – and soon – the governor needs to show he has more than the start of a plan but an actual blueprint for keeping the state safe while reviving the economy. It’s time for him to lead.
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Ralston has sympathy for the difficult decisions the Governor has to make, but he makes excellent points about how the people are looking for guidance, for hope, for a leader. And what they get is not that. I see it here. What if he came out and said that nothing is going to happen with The Strip opening until at least Fall? It would be devastating to many people here on VMB, but it would be some framework we can work with. We can plan for the future. We would have some kind of plan to work off of. Maybe it would have to change, but people are looking at heading to Vegas on May 1st and all signs point to there being no way the casinos will open then. But when? Is there any way to know? To have a plan and start to work cautiously towards it? At some point we have to have a plan. I'm still hopeful we will see something concrete from the Governor by the end of this week.

The Nevada Gaming Control Board has put out a 6 page document about reopening the casinos.
https://gaming.nv.gov/modules/showdocument.aspx?documentid=16703
It is asking all casinos to submit a reopening plan at least 7 days before reopening. They request the plans contain specific information. It does not cover what safety standards and distancing will be required in the casinos. Please feel free to read the document for any clues I missed, but it mostly deals with licensing and cash.

So where is Nevada with this virus? Nevada Independent has put out the 4th version of their "Coronavirus Contextualized" series.
https://thenevadaindependent.com/article/coronavirus-contextualized-4th-edition-exploring-through-data-covid-19-in-nevada-and-beyond

Gov. Steve Sisolak on Tuesday announced a framework under which Nevada could soon begin to reopen its economy, more than a month after restrictions shuttering non-essential businesses were first put in place. While state and local officials say the data show that social distancing is working, they aren't ready to say quite yet that Nevada has hit the downward part of the epidemiological curve. One of the criteria to move to the first phase of reopening the economy is a sustainable downward trajectory of COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations over a 14 day period. Though the data show that the number of cases last week decreased for the first time over the prior week's total, experts have noted that one week is not enough time to show any sort of trend.
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Nearly 4,000 people in Nevada, a state of about 3 million people, have tested positive for COVID-19. (That number was about 3,100 at the same point last week.)
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There were 947 new cases reported during the last full week for which we have data, according to county-reported totals, representing a 15 percent decrease over the prior week's total, 1,108 new cases. This is the first week that the total new cases has decreased from the prior week's total.
The week before that saw a 50 percent increase, and the week before that a 121 percent increase.
There is one more day left in the current week, but there have been 723 new cases so far, or a 24 percent decrease from last week.
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At this point, Nevada isn't ready to open for business. But state officials are evaluating to see when the state might be ready to do that. According to the latest data from the Nevada Hospital Association, there is still plenty of capacity left in the hospitals — which officials attribute to the social distancing measures enacted.

Until they determine it is safe enough to begin reopening parts of the economy, state and local officials are continuing to remind Nevadans to practice social distancing and stay at home. For the latest on what officials are recommending, visit the Nevada Health Response website at https://nvhealthresponse.nv.gov/
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Some other articles of note, but not Nevada specific:

A small study was done in VA hospitals to determine the effectiveness of hydroxychloroquine
https://apnews.com/a5077c7227b8eb8b0dc23423c0bbe2b2

Researchers analyzed medical records of 368 male veterans hospitalized with confirmed coronavirus infection at Veterans Health Administration medical centers who died or were discharged by April 11.

About 28% who were given hydroxychloroquine plus usual care died, versus 11% of those getting routine care alone. About 22% of those getting the drug plus azithromycin died too, but the difference between that group and usual care was not considered large enough to rule out other factors that could have affected survival.

Hydroxychloroquine made no difference in the need for a breathing machine, either.

Researchers did not track side effects, but noted a hint that hydroxychloroquine might have damaged other organs. The drug has long been known to have potentially serious side effects, including altering the heartbeat in a way that could lead to sudden death.
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This Vox piece addresses something I've been interested in, regarding Vegas. If you open it, will they come?
https://www.vox.com/2020/4/22/21228651/opening-up-save-economy-trump-coronavirus-pandemic-shutdown

Politicians hoping to jolt the economy back to life might be in for some disappointment when they discover governors can let businesses reopen but they can’t force people to patronize them.

This week, governors in states like Florida and Georgia are moving to reopen bowling alleys, nail salons, and dine-in restaurants in an effort to get economic life moving again. And an organized campaign by conservative economic interests is underway to lift restrictions faster in more places.

This will be an experiment, of course, but the best available evidence casts doubt on the idea that enough customers will return to make it possible for small businesses to stay viable without additional government assistance.

For example, we know customers began abandoning America’s restaurants before they were ordered closed, that the handful of states that have avoided broad lockdown orders are still feeling economic pain, and that huge swaths of the economy that have not been shut down are nonetheless experiencing a precipitous decline in sales.
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The problem is a question of fear. Americans fear spreading or contracting infection, so much so that they’ve overwhelmingly participated in social distancing measures. They tell pollsters by wide margins that they fear lifting those restrictions too soon much more so than too late. They’re willing to stay put even if it harms the economy.

They also fear economic hardship. That’s led prudent people, even those left relatively unharmed by the downturn so far, to delay nonessential purchases, like new cars, appliances, clothes, and other goods.

Whatever choices state officials make about opening things up, there’s not going to be a vibrant economy until real steps are taken to address those dual sources of fear.
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Beyond restaurants, the Trump administration’s relatively aggressive opening plan will still leave large segments of the economy largely shuttered.

In particular, Trump’s “Phase 1” plan — echoed by Republican governors — calls for white-collar workers to continue working remotely and calls for Americans as a whole to continue avoiding “non-essential” travel. Those are reasonable steps of caution that will continue to take a hammer to the economy. It can’t be fixed by reopening personal service businesses.

Hotel vacancy rates, for example, had already fallen by 25-50 percent as of mid-March while revenue per booked room fell by a third. This isn’t going to recover until people are told it’s safe to travel again. At $218 billion in annual revenue, the hotel industry is nearly triple the size of the combined hair and nail salon industries.
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By the same token, the International Air Transport Association’s survey data indicates that just 14 percent of the public say they’re likely to resume flying as soon as restrictions are lifted — with 40 percent of the population saying they’re likely to wait six months or more.
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What people do when their income falls— or when they fear that it might fall — is cut down on big-ticket purchases. They decide to forget about their plan to renovate the kitchen, and they hang on to their existing cars until they become completely unusable rather than upgrading.

This is what we’re seeing right now. New car sales are plummeting even though dealerships are still open to sell cars. Some of this could be the inconvenience or fear of going to a dealership, but dealers are trying hard to offer people good options for contactless home delivery and opportunities to test drive. Financing offers and other deals are excellent right now because inventory is piling up and dealers want to move it.

The problem is that one family’s spending is another family’s income. And while there’s nothing wrong with being prudent, a whole national cycle of prudence is self-defeating. One prudent family doesn’t buy a car, so the salesman doesn’t buy a fridge, so the appliance workers lose shifts. Declaring that we can all risk our lives to go to the movies next weekend doesn’t alter the basic dynamic.
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Even plans to “reopen” involve keeping large swaths of the economy on ice. The travel sector isn’t currently shut down but it’s almost completely collapsed anyway. Reopened restaurants and personal services like hair and nail salons won’t get all their customers back as long as the virus is still circulating. Devastation to state and local budgets is already baked into the cake. And many people are losing income and paring back on unnecessary spending, prompting further rounds of lost income.

There’s no way out of this that doesn’t involve curing the dual fears of infection and income loss. The former requires real public health victories, not just vague assurances. And the latter requires much more in the way of financial support for ailing businesses, local governments, and households.
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That's what I've got for today. Thanks for reading. I hope it's helpful.

Sonya · Apr 23, 2020

Well, I assume many of you saw the big Vegas news of the day yesterday, which is something I mentioned yesterday. Mayor Goodman made some waves with her comments on Anderson Cooper on CNN. I still don't think it's wise, from a PR perspective, to tell a world for of potential customers for a town almost wholly supported by tourism, that you want to be the "control group" for this virus. I know I heard from a lot of my less enthusiastic about Vegas friends who were freaking out about what she said. Anderson Cooper also interviewed Governor Sisolak later in the day. I'm going to include both videos here for you to watch, if you're interested.

Lots of local media covered this:

Nevada Independent:
https://thenevadaindependent.com/article/goodman-open-businesses-use-las-vegas-as-control-group-for-coronavirus

In a freewheeling CNN interview that contradicted messages from state public health officials, Las Vegas Mayor Carolyn Goodman said she offered to let the City of Las Vegas be used as a “control group” to determine whether social distancing procedures were effective.
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Gov. Steve Sisolak, local elected officials, including members of her council, and the leadership of the Culinary Union, criticized Goodman for her “control group” comments.

In an interview with Cooper Wednesday evening, Sisolak addressed them directly, saying he would “not allow the citizens of Nevada… to be used as a control group or a placebo.”

During the brief CNN interview, the governor emphasized that he was listening to the advice of medical experts and statisticians to determine when and how casinos could resume businesses.

“We’re going to do it right,” Sisolak said. “But I’m not going to allow our workers to be put in a position where they have to decide between their job and their paycheck and their life. That’s not a fair position to put them in, and I will not allow that to happen.”
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In a statement Wednesday, Geoconda Arguello Kline, secretary-treasurer of the Culinary Union, condemned the comments as “outrageous considering essential frontline workers have been dealing with the consequences of the crisis firsthand.” Eleven union members have died of COVID-19".
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Democratic Congresswoman Dina Titus released a statement stressing the need to heed the advice of scientists and to continue sheltering in place.

“Businesses in Las Vegas will only be able to recover if we take this pandemic seriously,” Titus said. “The mayor does not represent the Las Vegas Strip, literally or figuratively.”
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Marilyn Kirkpatrick, who chairs the Clark County Commission, the local entity responsible for representing the Las Vegas Strip, responded through the Clark County twitter account.

“I understand that people are frustrated, but we must be patient. If we’re not patient, then we risk a lot more sicknesses, a lot more deaths and we risk the very real danger of our health care system being overwhelmed,” Kirkpatrick said. “None of us who have been engaged in this conversation want to risk that and we certainly don’t want to be a “control group” for some out-of-left-field school science project.”
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And Nevada Current:
https://www.nevadacurrent.com/2020/04/22/dear-america-please-dont-hold-her-against-us/

Self-absorbed, disconnected from the factual issues at hand, worse than worthless to virtually everyone who lives and works in her city, and inane, it was a textbook example of what passes for policy in the City of Las Vegas as run by someone named Goodman.

Again, Cooper asked, what was Goodman doing in her capacity as mayor to help make testing — the necessary first prerequisite to reopening the economy — more widely available in Las Vegas?

Amid the ensuing word salad of conspiracy theories, dizzying contradictions, denials of past assertions even after they’d been read to her, and incomprehensible gibberish that characterized Goodman’s performance throughout the interview, Goodman managed to blurt that it was not her job to make testing more widely available in the city of which she is mayor.

Well thank goodness for that.
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They make my point about Public Relations:

But more disturbingly, as Goodman’s imbecility was going viral Wednesday, a considerable portion of the nation’s news consumers probably assumed that the City of Las Vegas is … A Thing That Matters … and that its mayor is somehow reflective or emblematic of a much larger and broader sentiment, both public and official, in Southern Nevada.

Much of the rest of the country already fosters preconceived notions about Las Vegas (the greater metro area, not the city) — for instance, that we are a shallow, greedy, seedy bunch, always looking to get over on some chump, and concerned solely with money and profit, with little regard for how it is obtained.

There is some truth to that, though those aren’t Las Vegas characteristics as much as they are American ones. As I’ve contended for years, Las Vegas isn’t nearly as uniquely bent and crooked and corrupt as it likes to think it is, comparatively speaking.

But now, thanks to Goodman, much of the country may be convinced that “Las Vegas” is also full of moronic crackpots.
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But the real Las Vegas, that is, the one that encompasses the city of Las Vegas but also the Strip and all the other things and people not in the city limits, is big enough to shoulder a little humiliation and embarrassment.

Sure it would be nice if Goodman wasn’t running around making a fool out of herself. But at the end of the day, we’ve got bigger fish to fry. And again, thank goodness she’s not in charge of … well, anything that matters.
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CDC Gaming Reports:
https://www.cdcgamingreports.com/vegas-mayor-draws-critics-ire-over-remarks-about-reopening/

Nevada officials condemned comments Wednesday by Las Vegas Mayor Carolyn Goodman after she called for casinos and other nonessential businesses to reopen and suggested the city could serve as a test case to measure the impact during the coronavirus pandemic. One local official called her comments “reckless and dangerous” and another described them as an “embarrassment.”
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“I offered to be a control group and I was told by our statistician you can’t do that because people from all parts of southern Nevada come into work in the city,” Goodman said. “We would love to be that placebo side so you have something to measure against.”

Goodman for weeks has spoken out against Democratic Gov. Steve Sisolak’s orders shuttering casinos and nonessential businesses, calling it “total insanity” that’s “killing Las Vegas.”
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NBC News:
https://www.nbcnews.com/business/economy/las-vegas-workers-push-back-after-mayor-s-call-reopen-n1190036

After Las Vegas Mayor Carolyn Goodman called Wednesday for the swift reopening of hotels and casinos, many who earn their livelihoods in such establishments said they were afraid to return unless strict safety measures were introduced for themselves and guests.
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D. Taylor, the president of UNITE Here, a union that represents more than 300,000 hospitality workers across the country, called Goodman's comments "one of the worst things I've heard."

"Nobody wants people to go back more than I do, but everyone wants to go back to a safe and secure workplace and not be an experiment in a petri dish," Taylor said.

Alexander Acosta, a banquet bartender with the Caesar Forum Conference Center, said the comments "struck a nerve" among workers.

"We're not test subjects. We're people. We are employees," Acosta said. "We try to live every day as we can. We shouldn't be test subjects."

Casino and hotel workers will not feel comfortable returning unless strict safety measures are introduced, including social distancing guidelines, thorough cleaning of facilities and temperature checks of patrons before they are allowed to enter.
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Jay Blake, who works in a VIP lounge at a Las Vegas casino, said that he understands Goodman's eagerness to return to normal but that he does not think she "put a lot of thought into what it could mean if we reopen too soon."

Blake said his job requires him to have more face-to-face interaction with guests than the average employee.

"Vegas is a unique destination, in that we rely on guests from all parts of the country, all parts of the world," he said. "I'm concerned if we open to everyone, [there will be] people coming from hot spots, places with outbreaks, where social distancing wasn't as stringent as it was here."
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Dee Kenny, 64, who works security at casinos on the Strip, said that she has underlying health issues and that for her to feel safe, she would like employers to provide workers with personal protective equipment and to test all employees for the virus and its antibodies.

"There's no proper protocols in place anywhere," Kenny said. "I'm not going to go back until I'm not at risk."

Acosta said he has spoken with other workers who are concerned about a shortage of protective equipment, similar to what health care workers are experiencing. As a bartender, he might need a mask and gloves, but he is worried whether he and his colleagues will have the correct equipment and enough of it.
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City Council Members weighed in:
https://thenevadaindependent.com/article/council-members-mayor-goodman-is-wrong

In the past few months, we have all witnessed the severity of the coronavirus (COVID-19) and the many ways it has affected us all. Life is different. We can no longer enjoy movies, casually go shopping at our favorite stores, meet friends for a “Happy Hour,” interact with family and friends — and many of us badly need a haircut.

We’ve dug deeper than ever before, and all have had to take on more responsibilities: care for the kids; become teachers overnight; take care of loved ones who are immunocompromised; figure out new ways to live, work, and play at home; and work around non-essential activities that we all once thought were essential.

We all want to reopen Nevada and get back to the way things have historically been. But times have changed. This disease and the spread of it has changed all of us, and we need to continue adapting and remaining cautious.
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We respectfully disagree with the mayor. Reopening the City of Las Vegas (or Southern Nevada) too soon could put our local economy in peril, and make the situation even worse. We stand in solidarity with Gov. Sisolak, Chairwoman Marilyn Kirkpatrick and the Clark County Commission (the board which governs the Strip and Southern Nevada’s largest industry), the Southern Nevada Health District, and the medical and scientific community.

Let’s think about it: we have done so much in the past 30-60 business days to flatten the curve. Our death rate compared to other states is significantly lower, and we are seeing many recoveries at local hospitals like University Medical Center. Reopening too soon could immediately undo all that we have achieved. Lives would be at risk. The health care system could be inundated. Supplies of PPE would deplete. Fearfully, this could lead to an even greater crisis of longer closures in the future.

Yes, we need to reopen soon. But too soon is dangerous and unwise.
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Working together, we will know when the time is right — and that time is yet to come.

When all of this is over, we’ll be judged by our careful actions and our methodical approach on how to best take care of one another. As City Council members, it is our duty to protect your lives by making the tough decisions. We swore an oath to defend one another, and we intend to carry out that oath in good times and bad.

Let us continue to stay healthy, protect one another, social distance, and listen to the facts and science that is provided daily. This community is resilient, as we’ve seen many times before, and we will get through this with patience, level-headedness, diligence, and grit. Nevada knows no defeat, and we will come back better and stronger once again.
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Here is the full statement put out by the Culinary Union:

There was a lot of reaction on social media. Most of it not kind to the Mayor. My personal favorite came from @ditzkof who says: "if only some prescient filmmaker had warned us of the dangers of trying to conduct business as usual in Las Vegas during a global crisis", and then included this awesome video clip from Mars Attacks.

Even Daniel Negreanu (@RealKidPoker) had something to add:
I couldn’t imagine a public official coming off worse in an interview.

There should be a mercy rule.

And she even got the Lord Farquaad from Shrek treatment:

Yikes. Bad time to be the Mayor, I guess. I hope it doesn't do any long term damage to tourism. So, enough of that.

CDC Gaming says that the virus has played havoc on Sands 1stQ finances:
https://www.cdcgamingreports.com/pandemic-plays-havoc-on-las-vegas-sands-first-quarter-financial-results/

Business disruption on two continents from the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic sent Las Vegas Sands to quarterly financial results the company hasn’t experienced in more than a decade since the recession.

Still, Las Vegas Sands President Rob Goldstein offered some light at the end of the tunnel.

He told analysts Wednesday the company’s casinos in Macau and Singapore – which provide a combined 85% of the company’s quarterly revenues – will be back on track later this summer.

“We feel confident that we’ll be in a much better place in the summer, and a much better place in the fall,” Goldstein said during a question and answer session after Las Vegas released results for the quarter that ended March 31.

“The eventual recovery will take more time in Las Vegas,” Goldstein said.
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“We don’t know how long this pandemic will last, but we are confident that travel and tourism spending in each of our markets and around the world will eventually recover,” Sands Chairman and CEO Sheldon Adelson said in prepared remarks on the outset of the first-quarter conference call.

“As surely as day follows night, people will travel again, shop again, and come together again to enjoy entertainment and social interaction, to exchange ideas and to conduct business,” Adelson said.
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During the quarter, Las Vegas Sands’ overall revenues fell 51.1% to $1.78 billion.

In Macau, where the pandemic curtailed the Chinese New Year celebrations in January and closed casinos for 15 days in February, overall revenues fell 65.2% to $802 million. In Las Vegas, where the Venetian and Palazzo have been closed since March 17, revenues fell 15.1% to $400 million. Singapore’s Marina Bay Sands saw revenues fall 20.2 percent. The resort is currently closed until at least May 4.

During the quarter, operating income companywide was down 94.3% to $55 million. Las Vegas Sands’ net loss in the was $51 million compared to net income of $744 million a year ago. Cash flow declined to $437 million, a drop of 69.9%.

Adelson credited the company’s balance sheet.

“Our company is fortunate to have the financial strength to enable us to focus our efforts on the safety and security of our team members and customers, and on making a difference to those in need in each of our host communities of Macau, Singapore, and Las Vegas,” Adelson said.
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Hard Rock expects it will take a year for its casinos to recover:
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/22/coronavirus-hard-rock-jim-allen-casinos-to-take-a-year-to-recover.html

Hard Rock International Chairman Jim Allen told CNBC on Wednesday he does not see a quick return to robust business after its coronavirus-closed casinos, hotels and restaurants reopen.

“There’s going to be a real challenge, especially here in the United States, as far as ramping the business back up. We’re planning on that taking a year,” said Allen, CEO of the Seminole Tribe of Florida’s gaming company, which bought the Hard Rock brand in 2007.
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MGM raises $750 million in new debt, says revenues fell 29% in the first quarter
https://www.cdcgamingreports.com/mgm-seeks-500-million-in-new-debt-says-revenues-fell-29-in-the-first-quarter/

In a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Las Vegas-based company said it currently has $6 billion in cash on its balance sheet, which includes more than $3.6 billion in recent drawdowns. The company said none of its current $11.8 billion of long-term debt comes due until 2022.
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MGM, which operates more than two dozen gaming and non-gaming properties in six states, said it is spending $270 million a month in efforts to keep the properties ready when lock-downs due to the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic are lifted.

“The proposed capital raise makes a strong financial position stronger,” Jefferies gaming analyst David Katz told investors Thursday. “The near-medium-term outlook for the business remains highly questionable. Taken in total, we believe the update supports our positive view, which is MGM can endure until recovery is clearer.”

As part of the filing, MGM preannounced first-quarter results, saying its net revenue was down 29% to $2.3 billion because of the COVID-19 disruptions to operations in both Macau and the U.S. from January through March. MGM said revenues from its Strip resorts, including Bellagio and MGM Grand, declined 21%. Regional gaming properties, including Beau Rivage in Biloxi, Mississippi, and MGM National Harbor and Maryland, were down 10%.

The company will report first-quarter earnings on Thursday.
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Meanwhile, MGM said it is working closely with government officials on reopening plans in each of its six states, including Nevada where the company operates 13 gaming and non-gaming properties on the Strip.

“We cannot predict the duration of the shutdowns or any limitations the government may impose on our operations when we are able to re-open,” the company said. MGM said restrictions could include the number of seats per table gaming, slot machine spacing, temperature checks, mask protection, and social distancing measures at restaurants and entertainment venues.

The company said it expects to see weakened demand at properties due to continued domestic and international travel restrictions, reduced consumer spending, and general economic uncertainty.

Analysts agreed. SunTrust Robinson’s Barry Jonas said a comeback by Strip resorts when they are cleared to reopen will be a slow process.

“We continue to have concerns over the long-term demand profile once casinos reopen on the Strip,” Jonas told investors. “We think a return to normalized levels could take some time versus regional markets given the Strip’s exposure to fly-to and corporate visitation, as well as relative non-gaming and table games exposure.”
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John L Smith has a piece in CDC Gaming giving kudos to Wynn for their plan to reopen, and to the Governor:
https://www.cdcgamingreports.com/commentaries/wynn-resorts-offers-a-thoughtful-way-forward-amid-pandemic-noise/

An unprecedented shutdown has put many thousands out of work and sent stocks plummeting. Some are being kept on salary, but many are not. The heartache at home is compounded by the fact that the COVID-19 virus has killed more than 160 Nevadans, more than 46,000 Americans, and more than 180,000 people worldwide. And the number of confirmed new cases remains in excess of 25,000 each day.

But that’s not what makes these such challenging times for the gaming industry. It’s what makes it like so many other businesses in our country that are part of a shared sacrifice to battle the virus on the best possible grounds – scientific ones.

What makes these deceptively difficult days for the casino business is that it has had to recalibrate its powerful traditional marketing machinery and focus not on nonstop party imagery, but on the greater business at hand: ensuring customer health and safety in the tremulous days ahead.

That’s part of what made last week’s reopening strategy by Wynn Resorts CEO Matt Maddox so heartening. First published in The Nevada Independent, the 23-page Health and Sanitation Program is a document as practical as it is heartening.

The plan is based on accepted best practices to slow the spread of the virus. Most of the ideas are pretty basic: increased handwashing, strict physical distancing, not more than four persons in an elevator at a time, and closed valet parking. Some of it is more innovative: thermal cameras and temperature checks at points of entry, for instance.

I believe smart companies eventually will blend a health and sanitation response team with their well-established security units. In the future, I’ll bet the Eye in the Sky won’t be just watching the games, but the players’ temperatures as well.
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We definitely need to do something for the unemployed, as the numbers continue to climb in Nevada, and across the country.
https://thenevadaindependent.com/article/the-indy-explains-whats-happening-with-nevada-unemployment-insurance

From mid-March through April 18, 349,431 initial claims have been filed in Nevada, which DETR officials say is more than any full calendar year in the state’s history. That figure represents about 22 percent of Nevada’s total workforce.

Nevada’s insured unemployment rate — a ratio of continued claims to covered employment — increased more than 4 percentage points in the latest week-to-week comparison, going from 9.6 percent to 13.7 percent.
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This CBS Poll does not seem to indicate a large majority are ready to get back to travel and going out.

Senator Jackie Rosen is going to try to get something in the next aid package to help small casinos:
https://thenevadaindependent.com/article/rosen-looks-to-next-broad-coronavirus-relief-bill-to-help-small-casinos-get-sba-emergency-loans

As Congress debates the next massive coronavirus relief package, Democratic Sen. Jacky Rosen is working to ensure that small casinos are not locked out of relief as they were for the Small Business Administration’s Paycheck Protection Program (PPP).

“We do have prescriptive language that I will fight to put in the fourth package,” Rosen said in a call with reporters Wednesday. “I don’t think there’s any reason to think it wouldn’t be.”

Rosen has yet to secure any Senate GOP support for her measure, but said she intends to seek it out from those who represent the 43 states where there is legalized gaming.

“I want to work with senators across the country that also have gaming in their state,” Rosen said. “They are our natural allies here and we’re gonna fight to put that in.”
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Three more workers at Resorts World have tested positive for Coronavirus:
https://www.fox5vegas.com/coronavirus/3-more-workers-at-resorts-world-las-vegas-site-tests-positive-for-covid-19/article_33b25f8e-6df0-11ea-9664-c7a16ebb9942.html

Three additional workers have tested positive for COVID-19 at the Resorts World construction site, a spokesperson for the company said Thursday.

These three new cases bring the total to seven total COVID-19 cases at the Resorts World site.

"In compliance with CDC guidelines and OSHA safety standards, Resorts World Las vegas and W.A. Richardson Builders continues to follow and implement maximum preventative policies and procedures to minimize risk of transmission," the company said in a statement.
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And last, but certainly not least, there are currently a LOT of rumors circulating out there about which casinos are going to open. I've seen TI reported often, including in the LVRJ:
TI Planning To Reopen May 15th
https://www.reviewjournal.com/business/casinos-gaming/treasure-island-planning-to-open-may-15-2012974/
But read the article carefully and it's not as clear cut as the headline makes it seem.

Treasure Island is planning to open its doors to guests May 15, despite Gov. Steve Sisolak saying Wednesday that gaming shutdowns, currently set to end April 30, will probably be extended an undetermined amount of time.

The property’s website says the casino-resort is closed by order of the governor’s office but “will reopen on May 15,” subject to change.

“As of right now, that is the plan,” Treasure Island spokeswoman Jennifer Renzelman said.

The website also says that the closure is currently scheduled through May 14 and is “subject to change,” but Sisolak has not publicly stated that casino closures will lift May 15.
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Sisolak told the Review-Journal on Wednesday that the state won’t know when to start counting down the 14-day time frame of declining COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations that his health advisers say must occur before any restrictions are lifted.

“We have not started a downward trajectory. So I can’t give you that day,” Sisolak said. “But I can tell you for certain some of the directives will have to be extended. We’re clearly not going to be opening up any gaming establishments, and some of the other businesses, we’re gonna have to continue with the social distancing and the avoidance of large group gatherings and whatnot regardless.”
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I saw an interesting tweet from someone who says they work at TI (sorry, couldn't confirm) who said, "They HOPE to reopen then. But even then it won’t fully reopen, only their coffee shop and breeze bar will be open and TWO floors to book will be open. Trust me i work there but even then i might not have a job any more because they are laying off 1000 people, social distancing."

I'm also hearing rumors about Venetian/Palazzo opening on June 1st, but nothing definite yet.

Again, I urge caution about getting your hopes up too high. We can't know yet what is going to happen. And, again, this is what Sisolak said on Wednesday (per LVRJ):

“We have not started a downward trajectory. So I can’t give you that day,” Sisolak said. “But I can tell you for certain some of the directives will have to be extended. We’re clearly not going to be opening up any gaming establishments, and some of the other businesses, we’re gonna have to continue with the social distancing and the avoidance of large group gatherings and whatnot regardless.”

I hope Vegas opens up as soon as it can, for my friends who work in Vegas, and for those of you craving hard to get back to town. But the last thing Vegas wants to do is to open only to have a bunch of people get sick and bring it back to their towns, resulting in Vegas having to shut down again. I think that having to shut down a second time would be worse for Vegas than waiting an extra month or two to know that they have all the different procedures and practices worked out before inviting the world back to Vegas.

Also, cases have to slow down, hospital beds need to empty, Nevada needs to seriously increase the amount of testing they are doing, and the casinos have a LOT of work to do to be ready for people to come back to Vegas. To suggest that can happen in the next three weeks, seems overly optimistic.

I'm not saying "don't get excited", I'm just saying to gird your proverbial loins so that you aren't crushed if the Governor extends the shut down another month in the next week or so.

That's it from me today. I'm tired. Quarantine is hard and it's wearing on me. I'm happy for the feedback that some of you are getting a benefit from me posting all of this news. I appreciate the kind words. It's not easy to gather and condense all this information for you, but I'm happy to do it while we are limiting threads here. I appreciate the PMs and emails from people to make sure I saw a news item or rumor. It helps to have extra sets of eyes out there.

Hopefully they can speed up some of these possible vaccines and our lives can get back to some sense of normalcy. I think we all are ready. But I'm also ready to spend quite a bit more time in my home, social distancing, if that's what the science dictates. My hope is that nobody here gets it, and nobody dies!!! I also look forward to a time when Vegas is mostly back to normal, and safe for all of us, regardless of COVID risk, are able to meet up in Vegas and share a drink or twelve at some casino and get to some serious shenanigans together. I think that we've earned it.

Sonya · Apr 23, 2020

Sonya said: ↑

That's it from me today.
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Okay, so I lied.

@win4me sent me an article I had missed and I knew you'd love the kicker in this story.

Unpausing Las Vegas: What might our valley look like after the shutdown lifts?
https://m.lasvegassun.com/news/2020/apr/23/unpausing-las-vegas-what-might-our-valley-look-lik/

A few tables have been removed, and every other slot machine will be turned off whenever TI reopens as a social distancing-friendly version of itself.

“We probably have too many of these right now,” says Jennifer Renzelman, Treasure Island’s vice president of communications, nodding at a two-seat bench at a dual-player slot machine. “Walking around a casino floor in Las Vegas, you want to see people smiling and having fun. Right now, it’s just kind of … sad.”

As at properties up and down the Las Vegas Strip, a makeshift Treasure Island crew is working to have the property ready for when Gov. Steve Sisolak lifts his shutdown order to restart business. Reopening could begin as early as May 1, but whenever it happens, it seems certain to usher in a significantly different resort era in the name of public safety.

“If we reopen and we’re not ready with the best plan possible, all the incredible work you’ve done will have been wasted, and [we] will run the risk of hurting our economy even more,” Sisolak said on April 16. “As soon as we finalize our state-specific plan to reopen, I will be right here, telling you exactly how we are going to do it.”
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Some of Southern Nevada’s social distancing and sanitation precautions had been implemented even before Sisolak directed casinos to close on March 17. Those measures—hand sanitizing stations, workers wiping down machines and chairs and efforts to minimize crowds—will likely be commonplace moving forward for an unknown period of time.

Resort officials say they plan to adhere to any safety guidelines put in place by local, state and federal officials, some of which could include masks for casino dealers and using thermal cameras to check potential patrons’ temperatures. (Those confirmed above 100 degrees would not be allowed on property, since an elevated temperature is a primary indicator of COVID-19.)

In a report released April 19, Wynn CEO Matt Maddox called for an early-May reopening of the resort corridor, detailing planned safety precautions. Under the Wynn plan, players and dealers would wear gloves, staff would sanitize chips and tables hourly, and tables would be removed to promote social distancing. Additionally, limits would be placed on the number of patrons allowed into a resort at any given time.

“I have been on calls almost daily with one of the country’s leading public health and pandemic preparedness experts, as well as various leaders in our medical community representing our hospitals,” Maddox wrote, “and they agree that an incremental reopening makes sense, and that science and data must lead us out of this in a safe fashion.”

And on April 21, MGM Resorts International CEO and President Bill Hornbuckle posted a video—filmed at his home—in which he said, “We’ll also be operating differently [going forward] … everything from how often we clean to how we greet or guests could and will change. Our casino floors will look different, and our restaurants will ultimately be impacted as well. … We have to consider every aspect of our business, so we can welcome our guests safely. … I have every confidence that we are up to this challenge.”
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Casinos aren’t expected to all open at once, especially for resort companies with multiple properties. A group like MGM Resorts International, for example, might initially open one or two of its resorts. Some properties could open with slots but without table games.

“We’re looking forward to getting our properties open as soon as we can,” says David Strow, spokesman for Boyd Gaming, which operates a dozen casinos in the Las Vegas area. “We’re waiting on the governor’s direction on that. What it looks like, we don’t know yet, but our intent is to meet or exceed all of the social distancing and sanitation guidelines. We want to protect the health and safety of our customers and our employees.”
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But locals’ lives are also impacted heavily by what happens on the tourist corridor, whether or not they work or spend much time there. It’s the engine that drives this Valley, and for that to resume, tourists need to begin coming back to town.

According to the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, 23% of Southern Nevada’s 2018 guests traveled here from California. And when the lid gets lifted on the statewide closure, it’s logical to assume they’ll be among the first to return.

“The locals market and the drive markets will be the first to come back,” LVCVA CEO Steve Hill said during an April 14 board meeting. “From a marketing standpoint, we’ll focus on the areas that offer the most potential [visitors] early on.”

Hill also warned, however, that Las Vegas should expect a “slow start and a gradual recovery throughout the year” because of the significant challenge that will be posed by physically getting visitors here.

“Even in that drive market, different markets … have the opportunity to come back before others,” Hill said. “We will both test those individual markets within driving distance of Las Vegas, as well as monitor the behaviors from those markets. We’ll then look at what we call city pairs, which is the ability to connect by flight to different cities.”
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How's this for a silver lining?

Those could include some changes to the Strip’s modern economic model, says Robert Lang, executive director of the Brookings Institution’s Mountain West research arm at UNLV. “One of the first stimulus measures will be, these companies will have to loosen up the cost structure,” Lang says. “To get the hotels full again, we’ll start to waive resorts fees and have it where nobody’s paying for parking. And we’ll have $1.99 steak and eggs again.”
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“While we are optimistic about the future of Las Vegas, we know the industry is going to remain closed for some period of time, and fiscal year 2021 is going to be difficult for the [tourism] industry,” Hill said. “We’re still excited, and we’re going to continue to build the next era of Las Vegas. There’s still nowhere like Las Vegas—it’s the only place where everything our customers and guests are missing can be found in one place.”

Peter Guzman, CEO of the Las Vegas Latin Chamber of Commerce, echoes Hill’s long-term optimism.

“I do believe that, once again, Las Vegas will be on top,” Guzman says. “We’ll do some rebranding of Las Vegas. When we get past the science and the medical component, and when it’s safe to open, I think Las Vegas is going to rock it. People who will go back to work, when they have some extra income, they’re going to want to come to Las Vegas. They’ll want to get over that funk and we’re going to have things going on. We’re going to come back quicker than people think.”
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I'm happy to be able to end this for today on a relatively happy note.

Sonya · Apr 24, 2020

Little less criticism of the mayor today, but wanted to share these polls from yesterday.

Las Vegas Sands announces it will pay employees through May 17th.
https://www.cdcgamingreports.com/las-vegas-sands-extends-employee-payments-in-nevada-until-may-17/

Las Vegas Sands Corp. will continue to pay its 10,000 Venetian and Palazzo employees through May 17, according to an internal company letter from Chairman and CEO Sheldon Adelson.
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“It remains unclear when the Strip and our properties here will be able to re-open, but we are in constant contact with the appropriate government entities as well as undertaking our own efforts to be prepared for that day,” Adelson wrote in the letter. “At this time, I’m very pleased to inform you that we are extending all benefits and pay until at least May 17.”

Las Vegas Sands, Wynn Resorts, and Station Casinos are the only gaming companies in Nevada that are paying workers during the casino closures, which began on March 17. MGM Resorts International furloughed 87% of its workforce but created an employee assistance fund that has $12.5 million.

Adelson told employees that the company’s management team pledged to pay all salaried, hourly, tipped, seasonal, and on-call employees during the closure.

“Our hope is to continue doing that right up until the time we re-open,” Adelson wrote.
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Passenger traffic at McCarran was down 54% in March:
https://lasvegassun.com/news/2020/apr/23/passenger-traffic-plummets-at-las-vegas-airport-in/

According to a monthly report released by Las Vegas airport officials today, just over 2 million passengers arrived at or departed from McCarran last month.

During March 2019, that number was upwards of 4.4 million, which means last month’s traffic was down 53%.

The international passenger count was down 58%.
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This article includes specific info about Southwest:
https://www.8newsnow.com/news/local-news/mccarran-passenger-count-drops-53-in-march-compared-to-2019-levels/

Southwest, which carries more passengers in and out of McCarran than any other airline, had passenger counts 62% lower than in March 2019.
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A feel good (ish) piece from Nevada Current about a local Fillipino Group who are making face shields for healthcare workers
https://www.nevadacurrent.com/2020/04/24/community-group-distributes-face-shields-to-frontline-healthcare-workers/

In March, Jay Tan was sheltering in place and looking for a way to help during the COVID-19 outbreak.

So the UNLV assistant professor and practicing nurse turned to foam pipe insulation and overhead projector sheets.
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Tan is a founding member of the Bayanihan Filiipino American Group, a group of community organizations that have teamed up to assist communities in need during the pandemic, and he figured he might be able to use his emergency room nursing skills to find a creative solution for protective personal equipment, or PPE, shortages that are putting medical professionals and patients at risk.

Individual makers and small groups like Bayanihan are mobilizing during the crisis because of a dire lack of PPE across the country, which has waves of medical personnel asking for help.
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Next, Bayanihan will move their efforts to assisting nursing homes and long-term care facilities, where they are already receiving requests for face shields. Compared to major hospitals, nursing homes have weaker supply chains for medical resources, but the practitioners there are in the front line in direct contact with the patients
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Twin River has acquired 3 casinos from Eldorado and Caesars for $180 million:
https://www.cdcgamingreports.com/twin-river-acquiring-three-casinos-from-eldorado-and-caesars-for-185-million/

Rhode Island-based Twin River Worldwide Holdings said Friday it was acquiring three casino properties currently operated Eldorado Resorts and Caesars Entertainment for a combined $180 million in separate transactions that would seemingly help the two companies move along their pending 10-month-old $17.3 billion merger agreement.

In separate deals, Twin River said it will acquire Eldorado Shreveport in Louisiana and the MontBleu Resort Casino in Lake Tahoe, Nevada from Eldorado for a combined $155 million. The transaction canceled Eldorado’s previously announced sale of the two properties to Las Vegas-based Maverick Gaming.

Twin River is also buying Bally’s Atlantic City from Caesars and real estate investment trust VICI Properties for $25 million.
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One of the triggers Governor Sisolak has cited for his reopening the city will be a 14 day decline in cases. That is still not happening.
https://thenevadaindependent.com/article/coronavirus-live-blog-week-seven

State health officials reported 4,398 coronavirus cases across Nevada on Friday morning, up 190 from Thursday. The death toll rose to 197, up two from Thursday.

The Southern Nevada Health District reported 3,443 COVID-19 cases on Friday, an increase of 129 from Thursday. The death toll in the county rose to 168, up five from Thursday. A total of 2,144 people, or 62.3 percent, have recovered from the virus in the county.

As of Friday, there have been 881 COVID-10 hospitalizations countywide, up 21 from Thursday. The health district does not report current hospitalization numbers.

The county also reported 860 total hospitalizations from the virus, roughly 26 percent of confirmed positive cases and an increase of 34 from Wednesday.

The Washoe County Health District announced 755 COVID-19 cases countywide, up 19 from Thursday. The health district also announced two more deaths — a female in her 90s and a male teenager, both with underlying conditions — bringing the countywide death toll to 24.

Washoe County District Health Officer Kevin Dick said that it’s “sobering” to see a teenager pass away from COVID-19 but noted that it’s a reminder that everyone is vulnerable to the virus, regardless of age.

The health district also announced 17 additional recoveries, for a total of 241 recovered individuals countywide. Officials reported that 490 people still have active cases of COVID-19 in the county, including 42 people who are hospitalized.

Officials in Humboldt County reported one new positive COVID-19 case on Friday afternoon, a woman in her 20s who is self-isolating at home. The rural Northern Nevada county has 35 reported positive cases of the virus, with two individuals hospitalized, two deaths and five recoveries.
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In that same blog post, further down, is the news that Sisolak has asked Washoe county to be ready to do 1000 tests a day by Monday. That is a goal they do not seem prepared to meet.

Washoe County officials said Friday that Gov. Steve Sisolak’s office wants them to be performing 1,000 COVID-19 tests a day by Monday, but that they don’t have the testing resources or lab capacity needed to do that yet.

Washoe County District Health Officer Kevin Dick, during a press availability with reporters, called 1,000 tests a day a “stretch goal” and that the health district is currently performing about 240 or 250 tests a day. He noted that the health district doesn’t even have 1,000 collection kits currently available and the Nevada State Public Health Laboratory, which processes the county’s samples, is only able to run about 500 tests a day.
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The health district is also working with the Nevada National Guard to expand its workforce capacity as the county eyes how to ramp up contact tracing alongside testing capacity. Dick said that the county has redeployed staff from additional departments to help with contact tracing and is training National Guard members to fill in additional gaps as well.

As far as where Nevada falls on the epidemiological curve, Dick said that modeling from the Los Alamos National Lab shows that if the SIlver State hasn’t hit its peak yet, it will soon.

“I think maybe we’re reaching the end of the beginning,” Dick said.
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This is good news that they are working to head in this direction. The sooner they get testing up to speed and begin contact tracing, the sooner Nevada can open for business.

The Administration has removed the restriction from the PPP program to allow small casinos to file claims.
https://www.reviewjournal.com/news/politics-and-government/trump-administration-pulls-rule-barring-ppp-loans-for-small-casinos-2013861/

As a result, small casinos and other gaming-related businesses with fewer than 500 employees will be eligible for PPP loans — a huge victory for the Nevada delegation, which objected when a decades-old Small Business Administration rule was applied to $350 billion in PPP loans to help all small businesses crippled by the pandemic.

Specifically, the rule denied PPP loans to small casinos and other businesses with fewer than 500 employees that made more than a third of their revenue from gambling.
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The Bulwark had a piece on the "fallacy of reopening America". Not Nevada specific, but some stark observations.
https://thebulwark.com/we-cannot-reopen-america/

he movement to “reopen” America is a fallacy based on a fantasy.

The fallacy is the notion that lifting stay-at-home orders will result in people going back to their normal routines. This is false. The state-issued stay-at-home orders did not determine most people’s desires to stay home—they merely ratified behaviors that the vast majority of people and institutions were already adopting in response to COVID-19.

The fantasy is that we can go back to what the world looked like 12 weeks ago. This is not possible now and will not be possible until we possess a vaccine for the novel coronavirus.

Understand that I am not saying that stay-at-home orders should be indefinite. What I am saying is that whenever the stay-at-home orders are rolled back—whether it is tomorrow or a month from now—it will not result in anything like a “reopening” of the country. And the sooner people grasp how completely and fundamentally the world has changed, the faster we’ll be able to adapt to this new reality.
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I'm going to quote the whole part of the piece on Las Vegas. I don't agree with everything he says here about Vegas, as he ignores the large drive in population from CA, but he makes good points.

Vegas, Baby
Las Vegas will not “reopen” because the city as we knew it in February 2020 is gone.

Las Vegas is the 28th-largest metropolitan area in America, home to 2.2 million people. Its main business is gambling-related tourism. The city welcomes roughly 42 million visitors a year who pour $58 billion dollars into the local economy and support 370,000 jobs. Almost 40 percent of the area’s workers are employed in the hospitality industry.

Up until this past January, 70,000 people got off an airplane in Las Vegas every single day, mostly to take in the city’s charms.

On these flights, passenger seats are roughly 17 inches wide with 31 inches of pitch. So in order to get to Las Vegas—where the principal pleasure is spending disposable income on hotel rooms, while eating expensive meals, and playing casino games—something like 150 people would share 8,000 cubic feet of cabin space and recycled air for anywhere from one to four hours.

So tell me: When the state of Nevada lifts the stay-at-home order that it issued on March 12 and the casinos that drive the state’s economy reopen their doors, do you think that Las Vegas is going to come roaring back?

Because I do not.

What is much more likely is that the former steady flow of visitors to Las Vegas will resume as a trickle.

There are economic reasons for this: National unemployment levels will be near 20 percent, so people will be grappling with a great deal of financial uncertainty. Disposable income will be at a low ebb. When disposable income is in retreat, people generally do not take extravagant vacations where the primary purpose is to lose money in an entertaining manner.

But there are health reasons, too: People who are older or immunocompromised—or who come into regular contact with someone who is older or immunocompromised—are going to curtail their behavior in order to cut down on unnecessary personal interactions.

Getting on an airplane to fly to a city so that you can stay in a hotel, eat in crowded dining rooms, and stand elbow-to-elbow with strangers around a craps table will be far, far down the list of behaviors on which most people are open to taking a risk.

Which means that the 28th-largest city in America is going to hollow out.

If the tourism industry were to only decline by 30 percent in Las Vegas, it would be an utter catastrophe. No tourists means no work for maids, taxi drivers, cooks, dealers, waiters, and the tens of thousands of jobs that make up the invisible, back-of-the-house operations in hospitality.

No jobs for the people in hospitality means a shockwave to the local economy: The retail and service sectors will be crunched. Real estate values will implode. The strain on social services will be gigantic.

The central fact to be grasped here is that “reopening” the economy is largely a formality until there is a vaccine. Because only then will people modify their behavior to something approximating pre-pandemic levels.
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Because the world has changed and the source of this change is not a government order.

It’s a virus.
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You can “reopen” the country all you want. You cannot force people to act as though there is not a pandemic.
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We are still very much in the “fog of war” phase of the calamity. . . . Few had seriously considered the contingency that the world economy might be shaken to its foundations by a communicable disease. And even now that this has happened, many remain trapped in the mental coordinates of a world that no longer exists.

Such “prewar” thinking is evident everywhere right now in the earliest phase of what may turn out to be a grave and protracted crisis. Here in the United States, we watch, week by week, as highly regarded financial analysts from Wall Street and economists from the academy misestimate the depths of the damage we can expect—always erring on the side of optimism.
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The reality of our near- and medium-term future is something very different. And whatever the government orders people to do, that reality will look more like our “stay-at-home” present than the pre-virus past.
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LVRJ has a piece about the casinos working on cleaning plans for reopening:
https://www.reviewjournal.com/local/the-strip/las-vegas-strip-hoteliers-outline-cleaning-plans-upon-reopening-2013760/

Nevada Gov. Steve Sisolak has yet to confirm when casinos will be able to reopen, but operators are already preparing for the day they’ll have to reassure guests their properties are clean and safe amid the virus outbreak.

MGM Resorts International, Las Vegas Sands Corp. and Wynn Resorts Ltd. have all discussed plans for more expansive cleaning measures within the last week, including the use of thermal screening, masks and social distancing.

This comes as Culinary Local 226 is negotiating with resorts amid the shutdown, seeking an enhanced cleaning standard for all areas of casinos.
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“As travel starts to return, many travelers will be anxious and uncertain about leaving home,” he said. “Hoteliers need to show people that they are safe and being cared for by their hosts. … When people feel safe, they’ll start traveling again.”
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In a video published Tuesday, MGM’s Acting CEO Bill Hornbuckle said the company’s properties would be “operating differently” when they reopen.

More details on these measures were released by MGM on Thursday morning, with a statement that said operations may include “restrictions on the number of seats per table game, slot machine spacing, temperature checks, mask protection as well as other measures at our restaurants and entertainment venues to enforce social distancing measures.”
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Sands President and COO Robert Goldstein said the company would look to Hong Kong as as example for health and cleaning guidelines.

Temperature checks, masks, gloves and social distancing are the norm as businesses there start to reopen.

“(In their restaurants), you sit a certain 5-10 feet apart, you get temp check coming in, you wear gloves, you wear masks,” Goldstein said. “I envision a similar environment here in Las Vegas.”

He added that it’ll be more difficult to acclimate to the new operations in Las Vegas because the general public is less familiar with wearing masks and public temperature checks.

“Although it’s going to take some time and some comfort to get acclimated. I think it’s going to happen,” he said. “The rooms will be clean beyond clean, (with) the wiping down of surfaces, social distancing.”
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This is re: Wynn

Guests will be reminded to sanitize their hands and wear masks. Cocktail servers and butlers will remain available to serve drinks and food, and baccarat buffet service will be suspended.

A number of cleaning operations have been added to table games. Supervisors are to sanitize table game rails and chair areas after each guest leaves a game. Dealers should sanitize dice for each new shooter, the on and off button when entering a game, and the exterior of the card shoe when entering a game and interior when the game goes dead. Other cleaning procedures, including deep cleaning the players lounge daily, are laid out in the new guidelines.
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Caesars Entertainment Corp. spokesman Richard Broome told the Review-Journal that the company “will build on the hygiene, cleaning and distancing protocols which were coming into practice when properties were ordered to close last month.”

Those protocols include increased availability of hand sanitizer, slot machines cleaned every three hours, every other slot machine turned off, every other position at table games removed, restaurant tables separated by 6 feet, and reduced bar capacity by half.

He added that the company will “follow reopening directives issued by the government.”

Boyd Gaming Corp. spokesman David Strow declined to comment, and Station Casinos spokesman Michael Britt did not respond to a request for comment.
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Looks like we might get our first test case for a casino opening on May 1st, as the Cour d'Alene Casino in Idaho has announced it's plans to open.
https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2020/apr/23/cda-casino-to-reopen-may-1-with-mask-social-distan/

The Coeur d’Alene Casino is set to reopen May 1, according to the Coeur d’Alene Tribal Council.

But that won’t happen without strict safety measures, including a requirement for everyone to wear masks, increased distance between seating at restaurants, lounges and games, plexiglass barriers in some locations and enhanced cleaning.

All concerts and large events have been rescheduled, according to the tribal council. The Spa Ssakwa’q’n, the High Mountain Buffet, bingo and horse races will remain closed initially.

The Coeur d’Alene Casino Resort Hotel will reopen in a limited capacity on Monday.
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It will be interesting to watch and see what happens with CdA Casino. Sounds like their plans mimic the ones Vegas has been putting out. The tribe currently has zero cases on their reservation.

And that's it for now. Thanks everybody!

Sonya · Apr 25, 2020

Happy weekend, everybody. Or, at least I think it's the weekend.

Here we go...

Mayor Goodman has decided that if she keeps talking, maybe her bad press will go away. Yesterday afternoon, she released this statement:

I understand the sentiment she is expressing here, and she's not wrong. Vegas needs tourism to survive. But they also need to not kill tourists to survive. And offering them up as some kind of case study to see if the virus is as bad as science says it is seems short sighted. I don't think she phrased herself well and this is a better attempt to say what she's saying. She is not a scientist and I believe that the heat in Vegas will kill the virus as much as I believe that a time share sales pitch is a good use of your time.

The Reno Gazette Journal was also critical of her claims about heat:
https://www.rgj.com/story/news/2020/04/24/las-vegas-mayor-desert-heat-bake-covid-19-science-isnt-so-sure/3024057001/

Days after facing national blowback for pushing the reopening of Las Vegas, Mayor Carolyn Goodman is now suggesting Southern Nevada's triple-digit desert temperatures will be enough to slow the spread of COVID-19.

“Although it has not been clearly determined as to the effect that extreme warmth will have on the virus, it is assumed that it shall deter its ferocity,” Goodman said in a statement on Twitter Friday afternoon. “We certainly are looking forward to having our desert heat provide that required substantiation.”
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Goodman's statement follows President Donald Trump's suggestion that scientists study whether sunlight or disinfectants could be used to treat coronavirus patients, a proposal that prompted alarm from health experts who warned Americans against embracing unproven remedies.

The mayor pitched Las Vegas as a city with summers hot enough to stagger the deadly respiratory virus. “Our hot summer coupled with our unique economy compel us to be at the forefront of America’s ‘reopening,’” Goodman said.
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Yet science does not support the theories touted by the president and mayor.

Dr. Jesse Goodman, the former chief scientist of the FDA and now a Georgetown University professor and attending physician, told USA TODAY the amount of heat and light needed to kill the virus would be harmful to cells within the body and was "not something we now have evidence to support."

"The virus is predominantly inside cells, and the amount of light or heat that you would have to deliver would be toxic to the cells as well," he said.

Ultraviolet light is used to sterilize hospital equipment, he noted, but the level of light is "toxic to human cells, and in fact people can't be in those rooms when they're being sterilized with those devices."
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Also, it's supposed to get hot in Vegas this week. We can watch and see if the caseload goes down in 95-100 degree temps.

Caesars Entertainment has announced Caesars Cares, and employee assistance fund:
https://lasvegassun.com/news/2020/apr/24/caesars-announces-employee-assistance-fund/

Caesars Entertainment today announced a new employee assistance fund to help employees suffering hardships because of the coronavirus crisis.

The Caesars Cares Fund will be supported by contributions from members of the company’s board of directors and some executives, according to a company news release.

About 90% of the company’s U.S. workforce has been furloughed as a result of shuttered resort properties in response to the COVID-19 outbreak.

Caesars has about 60,000 employees around the world, about half of them in Las Vegas.
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If you'd like to see or donate to the program, visit their website at https://www.caesars.com/cares

I know this won't be of interest to many of you, but I thought it was too good to not share.
https://www.8newsnow.com/i-team/i-team-las-vegas-and-the-1918-spanish-flu-pandemic/
8NewsNow in Vegas has a video of a 32 minute interview with Nevada historian and former KLAS News Director Bob Stoldal about the 1918 flu and Las Vegas. I found a lot of the little details to be very interesting. And plus, since you're stuck at home, you have the 32 minutes to spare.

Not Vegas, but of interest. A financial analysist from UBS, Disney may not open until 2021.
https://www.8newsnow.com/news/disney-theme-parks-may-remain-closed-until-2021-financial-analyst-predicts/

Disney theme parks in the U.S. have been shuttered since mid-March and could remain that way until the beginning of 2021 due to the ongoing coronavirus health emergency, according to one analyst at global financial firm UBS.

In a report released to clients Monday and obtained by several media outlets, including USA Today and the Los Angeles Times, John Hodulik estimated that the Walt Disney Co. will not reopen Disneyland in Anaheim or Walt Disney World in Florida until Jan. 1.

“We believe Parks’ profitability will be impaired for a longer period of time given the lingering effects of the outbreak and now assume an opening date of Jan. 1 as our base case,” wrote Hodulik, who is the Switzerland-based investment bank’s managing director of investment research.

But even when the theme parks do reopen their gates, their attendance will likely only be half of what it was in 2019, according to the report.

“We now believe the lingering effects of the outbreak — including crowd avoidance, new health precautions, etc. — will dramatically reduce the profitability of these businesses even after they are reopened until a vaccine is widely available,” the report stated.

Health officials have repeatedly said it could take 12 to 18 months to produce an effective vaccine, and many have called even that timeline optimistic.

The theme park closures were initially slated to last for just a couple of weeks. Then, when the outbreak took hold across the country in late March, the company announced that resorts on both coasts would be “closed until further notice.”
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Also not Nevada related, this article talks about the danger of blood clots with COVID-19, and how it's killing younger people than expected from strokes usually seen in much older people.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2020/04/24/strokes-coronavirus-young-patients/

The patient’s chart appeared unremarkable at first glance. He took no medications and had no history of chronic conditions. He had been feeling fine, hanging out at home during the lockdown like the rest of the country, when suddenly, he had trouble talking and moving the right side of his body. Imaging showed a large blockage on the left side of his head.

Oxley gasped when he got to the patient’s age and covid-19 status: 44, positive.

The man was among several recent stroke patients in their 30s to 40s who were all infected with the coronavirus. The median age for that type of severe stroke is 74.
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As Oxley, an interventional neurologist, began the procedure to remove the clot, he observed something he had never seen before. On the monitors, the brain typically shows up as a tangle of black squiggles — “like a can of spaghetti,” he said — that provide a map of blood vessels. A clot shows up as a blank spot. As he used a needlelike device to pull out the clot, he saw new clots forming in real-time around it.

“This is crazy,” he remembers telling his boss.
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Reports of strokes in the young and middle-aged — not just at Mount Sinai, but also in many other hospitals in communities hit hard by the novel coronavirus — are the latest twist in our evolving understanding of the disease it causes. The numbers of those affected are small but nonetheless remarkable because they challenge how doctors understand the virus. Even as it has infected nearly 2.8 million people worldwide and killed about 195,000 as of Friday, its biological mechanisms continue to elude top scientific minds. Once thought to be a pathogen that primarily attacks the lungs, it has turned out to be a much more formidable foe — impacting nearly every major organ system in the body.
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The analyses suggest coronavirus patients are mostly experiencing the deadliest type of stroke. Known as large vessel occlusions, or LVOs, they can obliterate large parts of the brain responsible for movement, speech and decision-making in one blow because they are in the main blood-supplying arteries.

Many researchers suspect strokes in covid-19 patients may be a direct consequence of blood problems that are producing clots all over some people’s bodies.

Clots that form on vessel walls fly upward. One that started in the calves might migrate to the lungs, causing a blockage called a pulmonary embolism that arrests breathing — a known cause of death in covid-19 patients. Clots in or near the heart might lead to a heart attack, another common cause of death. Anything above that would probably go to the brain, leading to a stroke.
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Chou said one question is whether the clotting is because of a direct attack on the blood vessels, or a “friendly-fire problem” caused by the patient’s immune response.

“In your body’s attempt to fight off the virus, does the immune response end up hurting your brain?” she asked. Chou is hoping to answer such questions through a review of strokes and other neurological complications in thousands of covid-19 patients treated at 68 medical centers in 17 countries.
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Oxley said the most important thing for people to understand is that large strokes are very treatable. Doctors are often able to reopen blocked blood vessels through techniques such as pulling out clots or inserting stents. But it has to be done quickly, ideally within six hours, but no longer than 24 hours: “The message we are trying to get out is if you have symptoms of stroke, you need to call the ambulance urgently.”
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The Nevada Independent has a Q&A with the Governor:
https://thenevadaindependent.com/article/indy-qa-steve-sisolak-on-ramping-up-testing-releasing-prisoners-and-requiring-masks-in-public

Gov. Steve Sisolak said that to reopen the economy, the state needs to significantly ramp up testing — two or three times the roughly 1,000 tests currently conducted daily — although he denied that he had ordered county health districts to reach specific numerical testing benchmarks.

In an interview with The Nevada Independent on Friday, the governor also gave more details as to how the state plans to analyze COVID-19 related data that will be used to determine when Nevada can move to a “Phase 1” of limited business reopenings that he detailed in a press conference on Tuesday.

He also hinted that stricter requirements on wearing facial coverings while out in public may be in the cards, while saying the state would likely make it mandatory for grocery and other “essential” store workers to wear masks while on duty.
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The governor said the state was running about 1,000 tests a day, but would need two and a half to three times that amount in order to get to an “adequate” number.

During a press conference earlier this week, Sisolak said the state would need to see consistent decreases in positive cases and hospitalizations over 14 days before moving to a “Phase 1,” where some businesses could begin slowly opening their doors and operating again.

Sisolak said during the interview that he would be looking at broader trends in testing as opposed to day-by-day analysis in making those determinations, saying that he was focused more on a rate of positive tests as opposed to raw numbers of positives because of issues with inconsistent reporting from state and local health authorities from day to day.

The governor said he understood the frustration of not having a solid reopening date for people and businesses to look forward to, but reiterated that moving too quickly could lead to a second spike of cases and additional stress on the health care system.

“I don’t want to have two weeks on the front end here for people to say, ‘Look, the governor let us off the hook if you opened up this business and that business and I’m happier for two or three days while it’s that way’,” he said.” And then three weeks later I get this massive, massive spike again. It’s a circle, let’s shut it all back down, and we undid all of the good that we’ve done for the last six weeks.”
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As some counties and states with high rates of COVID-19 infection have begun requiring individuals to wear masks or face coverings while out in public, Sisolak said he was “seriously considering” requiring and not just asking store owners and employees to wear masks while working.

But the governor said he was more hesitant to mandate the general public wear face masks, saying he was hopeful that individuals would comply with the recommendation without making it an official order from the state.

Still, Sisolak said he found it frustrating to see images of protesters not wearing masks or congregating en masse without six feet of separation, saying that ignoring those recommendations would likely continue spreading the virus and possibly open the door to stricter directives.
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Howard Stutz says Get Ready to Wear a Mask if you want to go to a casino
https://www.cdcgamingreports.com/commentaries/put-on-a-medical-facemask-if-you-want-to-go-back-to-a-casino/

Questions are now focused on how the gaming industry reopens, getting the employees back to work safely, and if casino customers are ready to return to their pre-pandemic activities. The lack of airline flights into Las Vegas presents Strip casino operators a far different roadblock from the challenges facing drive-in markets in regional gaming states.
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Most believe casinos nationwide will re-open with an assortment of social distancing measures and safety precautions in an effort to satisfy a wary public. Similar procedures will take place in non-gaming businesses, including restaurants, retail outlets, and entertainment venues.

“We’re all going to be wearing masks for a while,” Dr. Rochelle Walensky, infectious diseases chief at Massachusetts General Hospital, predicted during a podcast with the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Goldstein, who told analysts he often wears a medical mask at the Sands’ casinos in Macau, said Americans are much less relaxed with the concept. “It’s going to take some time and some comfort to get acclimated.”

Several ideas have already been spelled out by casino companies, including limits on table game seats, increased spacing between slot machines, temperature checks for customers as they arrive at a property, mask protection and even gloves for both customers and employees, and enhanced cleaning operations throughout the properties.
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MGM Resorts Acting CEO Bill Hornbuckle said casinos will look different, although he didn’t go into detail.

It’s not going to be a one-size-fits-all approach.
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Customers and gaming employees want to go back to their former routines.

But are they ready to put a medical mask to do so?
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And Governor Sisolak did an interview with KNPR News:
https://knpr.org/knpr/2020-04/governor-says-resorts-worried-mayors-comments-will-hurt-vegas
It's a 15 minute interview and they cover several topics:

Mayor Goodman's comments and the reaction of industry people to her comments.

About reopening the casinos, including wanting to see a 14 day downturn in infections. Test positives will go up as they increase testing. It's the percentage. Right now it's 12-13%, which is high, but probably caused by only testing very sick people. He's more focused on the number of hospitalizations and the number of ICU beds being used. Those are the numbers he wants to see go down before reopening.

He talked about his concerns about the economy and getting people back to work. He's going to focus on Phase one openings for now. Curbside delivery, opening golf and parks, opening elective surgeries and see how that goes for a couple of weeks and then expand some more. There won't be a flip of a switch, it will be slowly increasing a dial.

"Everybody is just guessing with these numbers." Then he talks about how people might still be afraid of going out. All these financial estimates are guesses.

"Gaming Tax and Room Tax will have to resume at some point." It's all unknown at this point.

Talk about prisons with Coronavirus problems and possibly releasing some prisoners.

Further funding from the Fed for the States and possible problems with Mitch McConnell's statements about how states should go bankrupt instead.

When asked about the most difficult part of dealing with this virus, he says it's talking to people who have lost loved ones, or want to visit a dying patient in a nursing home.

I was also asked to share this article with you all about a plan in the Administration to propose some kind of "liability shield" to prevent businesses for being sued if you contract the coronavirus. They thought it might be something VMBers would want to be aware about when making your travel plans.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/04/24/liability-shield-white-house-coronavirus/

White House officials are hotly debating whether and how to propose a “liability shield” that would prevent businesses from being sued by customers who contract the coronavirus, according to four people aware of the internal planning effort, as the administration seeks to encourage businesses to reopen without fear of being hit by lawsuits.

Attorneys in the White House Counsel’s Office are reviewing the matter, but some administration officials have raised objections to the idea, including whether it would expose the federal government to legal claims, according to two of the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. Some White House advisers also have expressed concern that the plan might provoke a political firestorm.
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President Trump has pushed to “reopen” the country to reverse the economic devastation caused by the coronavirus pandemic, but numerous executives have told the White House they are hesitant to reopen stores given the potential legal risk, these people said. White House officials are likely to seek the “liability shield” as part of the next stimulus package being taken up by Congress, and also are likely to enact an executive order and unilateral regulatory reform to curtail firms’ liability, a senior administration official said. The exact details of such an order have not been determined and planning remains in flux.
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It also has provoked internal debate among White House officials. Some small businesses have told White House advisers that the liability waiver is not a top priority for them and that they want the administration to instead focus on expanding the small-business loan program crucial to their survival.
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At a White House news briefing earlier this month, Trump said the administration was exploring the idea of “trying to take liability away” from companies.

“We just don’t want that because we want the companies to open and to open strong,” he said.

Kudlow told reporters Friday that the White House does not believe businesses should be held liable if a customer later tests positive for the coronavirus.
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Some powerful industry interests have pushed Congress to adopt similar measures. Earlier this month, a consortium representing some of the nation’s largest companies — including the International Foodservice Distributors Association, the International Franchise Association and the National Association of Convenience Stores — wrote to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) arguing that their businesses were “good Samaritans” putting themselves at risk of frivolous lawsuits by trying to reopen.
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I understand that WaPo is behind a paywall for many of you without a subscription, so here are some other links on the same subject:
https://www.rollcall.com/2020/04/17/as-workers-face-virus-risks-employers-seek-liability-limits/
https://politicalwire.com/2020/04/24/white-house-mulls-liability-shield-for-firms/
https://qz.com/1843873/us-businesses-wants-immunity-from-coronavirus-lawsuits/
https://www.rawstory.com/2020/04/trump-says-hes-aiming-to-shield-corporations-from-legal-liability-for-workers-who-contract-covid-19-on-the-job/

Unless there's some big news, that's it for this weekend. Stay safe! Take care of yourselves, and each other.

Sonya · Apr 27, 2020

Someone pointed out that page three is getting REALLY LONG. I'm going to experiment with breaking up some of the longer posts into topics.

A story has come out claiming that the first cases of COVID in the US were much earlier, and at CES in Las Vegas.
https://www.apmreports.org/story/2020/04/23/covid-infected-attendee-ces-tech-conference

When a doctor phoned Michael Webber on Monday with the results of his antibody test for the coronavirus, her first word was filled with irony: "Congratulations." He had tested positive, meaning that the 49-year-old who divides his time between Texas and France had been infected with the virus and recovered.

While millions of people worldwide will likely have antibody tests that return positive results, Webber's outcome offers new insight into how the virus may have begun to spread. He was among more than 170,000 people who attended the Consumer Electronics Show between Jan. 7 and 10 in Las Vegas, a four-day event that attracted technology professionals from around the world.
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I ask people to use some caution about this story. There is a lot of controversy about the antibody tests.
https://abcnews.go.com/Health/reality-check-antibody-testing-race-forward-thoughtfully/story?id=70214520

"There is just so much variety in these assays out there, and we too have seen some tests to have a very high level of false positive results using samples that were collected prior to the outbreak," said Eliza Theel, Ph.D., director of Mayo Clinic Infectious Diseases Serology laboratory testing.

Another major issue experts cite is the lack of standardized validation protocols. "You can cherry pick what your controls are," said Wells.

Validating tests with the right samples is essential in order to minimize the potential of false positives and negatives.

"False positive means that the antibody reaction detected an antibody, but from some other coronavirus or some other related infection," according to Dave Koch, Ph.D., director of clinical chemistry, toxicology and point-of-care testing at Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta. "There is also possibility of a false negative: I actually have the virus but the antibody hasn't shown up yet or hasn't gotten to the detection limits in the bloodstream yet."
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MGM Resorts has cancelled reservations through May 21st
https://vegasinc.lasvegassun.com/business/gaming/2020/apr/24/mgm-cancels-las-vegas-reservations-may-21/
When I checked the websites for the MGM properties, many were not accepting reservations before June 1st now, as well.

MGM Resorts International has canceled room reservations at its Las Vegas properties through May 21, a company spokesman said on Friday.
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And a little snippet about reopening.

Whenever the Las Vegas Strip reopens, MGM officials expect to open their properties incrementally, according to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing made by the company this week.

MGM filing indicated the company’s 10 Strip casinos will be opened in phases, something that gaming industry insiders have speculated to be the path forward to reopen the popular resort corridor.

The phased approach would make sense because of “demand needs and continued compliance with any government imposed restrictions on our operations or policies we choose to implement as necessary to mitigate the impact of COVID-19,” according to MGM officials.
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The COVID-19 Task Force for Nevada (headed by former CEO of MGM Resorts, Jim Murren) reported the PPE and cash donations they have received to help.

Eater Vegas reports they are doing a massive renovation of the Bacchanal Buffet
https://vegas.eater.com/2020/4/21/21229049/bacchanal-buffet-2-4-million-makeover-caesars-palace

Despite eager media speculation regarding the fate of buffets on the Strip, one resort is investing heavily to make sure a crown jewel of all-you-can-eat dining won't be mothballed when visitors ultimately return to Las Vegas.

The $100 million, 25,000-square-foot, 600-seat Bacchanal Buffet filed paperwork earlier this year to remodel a section of the food line and has now revised the plans to allocate an estimated construction budget of $2.4 million for the makeover. The renovation at the buffet at Caesars Palace focuses on a 2,120-square-foot area, and the changes will affect the existing food counters, service equipment, and the ceiling and floor finishes.
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An estimated timetable for the remodel or its completion have also not been announced.
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ESPN has an optimistic article about whether or not we will see any baseball in 2020:
https://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/29101917/passan-20-questions-there-mlb-2020-just-matter-where-how

The MLB season should have turned one month old Sunday. Rather than lament that, let's instead fill the emptiness with a discussion about when the season will start.

Yes, will. Over the past two weeks, as states have begun to plan their reopenings, nearly everyone along the decision-making continuum -- league officials, players, union leaders, owners, doctors, politicians, TV power brokers, team executives -- has grown increasingly optimistic that there will be baseball this year.

This optimism is guarded and cautious and laden with caveats. It exists in a reality twisted by the coronavirus -- one that acknowledges what seems possible today may not necessarily be tomorrow. There are a million questions. Consider what follows an attempt to answer 20 of the most pertinent -- some about baseball's return and those roadblocks, others about the coronavirus' short- and long-term impact, and a few about various odds and ends worth tying up before the entirety of our focus trains on Spring Training 2.0.
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Sonya · Apr 27, 2020

This morning Governor Sisolak tweeted out that he has joined the Western States Alliance for reopening in the face of Coronavirus.

Here are his tweets:

Today, Nevada is joining California, Colorado, Oregon & Washington in the Western States Pact. I believe sharing information & best practices on how to mitigate the spread, protect the health & safety of our residents,& reopen responsibly  will be invaluable.
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We share three major principles in this agreement. No 1: The health & safety of residents comes first. No. 2: Health outcomes & science - not politics - will guide decision making. And No. 3: Our states will only be effective when working together against #COVID19.
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With that in mind, there are four main goals. No. 1: Protect the vulnerable. No. 2: Ensure care for the sick. No. 3: Mitigate the non-direct impacts on our communities. No. 4: Protect the public by ensuring an lifting of restrictions include a system to test, track and isolate.
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Millions of visitors from our fellow Western states travel to NV every year & this partnership will be vital to our immediate recovery & long-term economic comeback. I look forward to continued conversations with @GavinNewsom, @OregonGovBrown,@GovInslee&@GovofCO
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Here's an article from Las Vegas Sun:
https://lasvegassun.com/news/2020/apr/27/nevada-joins-western-states-pact-for-covid-19-resp/

We need to see a decline in the rate of spread of the virus before large-scale reopening, and we will be working in coordination to identify the best metrics to guide this,” the agreement states.

The pact also outlines four goals: protecting vulnerable populations in places like nursing homes and other long-term care facilities, ensuring hospitals are at adequate surge capacity for supplies and personal protective equipment, mitigating COVID-19 impacts on marginalized communities and establishing expanded testing, contact tracing and isolation.

Last week, Sisolak announced criteria for slowly reopening nonessential businesses in Nevada, which includes a downward trajectory of of COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations over a 14-day period, maintained hospital capacity without crisis standards of care, a sustained ability to protect vulnerable populations and confirmed protective measures in places of business. He did not announce a concrete date on when an incremental reopening would happen.

The shutdown order in place is scheduled to last through at least Thursday, but likely will be extended.
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And another from Nevada Current:
https://www.nevadacurrent.com/blog/nevada-joins-western-states-pact/

Sisolak was asked during an April 21 press conference about joining the pact, but didn’t specify either way. “(Those governors) all have great plans and I support what they’re doing,” he responded.

The pact has four goals:

Protecting vulnerable populations at risk for severe disease if infected. This includes a concerted effort to prevent and fight outbreaks in nursing homes and other long-term care facilities.

Ensuring an ability to care for those who may become sick with COVID-19 and other conditions. This will require adequate hospital surge capacity and supplies of personal protective equipment.

Mitigating the non-direct COVID-19 health impacts, particularly on disadvantaged communities.

Protecting the general public by ensuring any successful lifting of interventions includes the development of a system for testing, tracking and isolating. The states will work together to share best practices.

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And last in this post, the Reno Gazette Journal has a letter from former governors, a senator and a first lady, giving credit to the good job they feel Governor Sisolak is doing right now.
https://www.rgj.com/story/opinion/voices/2020/04/27/former-governors-nevada-returns-normalcy-remain-diligent/3033097001/

We’ve never been prouder to be Nevadans.

To witness firsthand the way Nevadans have embraced the greatest challenge in the 155-year history of our great state, worked together and turned the tide on the COVID-19 outbreak is inspirational.

With the very fabric of our families, jobs and businesses hanging in the balance, and while facing the unsettling health fears of this terrible epidemic, Nevadans have remained strong and resilient.

We have witnessed the closing of the Las Vegas Strip, unprecedented unemployment, our neighborhood businesses being shuttered and personal suffering both financially and emotionally at every turn. Yet, Nevadans did not back down. We did not retreat. We took it head-on.

So many of our fellow Nevadans deserve enormous credit, from our frontline health care heroes, our first responders, the National Guard, our governor and many local leaders, our teachers and students who are overcoming the challenges of distance learning, to those who have volunteered to lead a task force which raised millions of dollars to purchase vitally needed medical supplies. Nevadans have truly come together from every part of the state to help one another.

Now, as the worst may be behind us, we can begin to look at turning the corner, rebuilding our economy and regaining some level of normalcy in our lives.

During this transition, we ask you to remain diligent and follow the commonsense safety measures in place. All Nevadans share a responsibility to protect each other and be safe.

We are confident a smart, planned reopening of our economy and the restoration of many jobs will be laid out in the coming days.

Then, Nevada will begin to rise again to regain its place as a vibrant and thriving state where we are all proud to live, work and raise our families.

We look forward to Nevada’s future with confidence in our people, our businesses and our leaders.

Good days are just ahead.

God bless you, your families and the great state of Nevada.

Senator Richard Bryan

Governor Jim Gibbons

Governor Robert List

Governor Bob Miller

Governor Brian Sandoval

First Lady Dema Guinn
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Sonya · Apr 27, 2020

In this post I'm going to focus on the reopening of Las Vegas.

First, this article:
When Will Mississippi Gulf Coast Casinos Open?
https://www.sunherald.com/news/business/article242238281.html

While Reeves is allowing some businesses to open with restrictions, he told MSNBC Thursday, “We don’t think that the gaming market is ready to reopen yet.”
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Reeves said in a press conference Friday that casinos have a disadvantage of a drawing large numbers of people but the advantage of having large facilities so people can spread out for social distancing. He said he expects casinos won’t open until the Gaming Commission the State Health Department are all on the same page about the timing.

In Nevada, where the coronavirus pandemic forced the first industry shutdown since the 1963 assassination of President Kennedy, the Nevada Gaming Board this week issued a 6-page plan for reopening casinos and club venues.

In South Mississippi, all 12 casinos were closed for months following Hurricane Katrina and have closed many times for hurricanes on the Coast and flooding on the Mississippi River.

“The resilience part is not in question,” said Keith Crosby, general manager at Palace Casino in Biloxi. South Mississippi’s casino industry and employees have proven they are resilient, he said. And unlike 2005 when Katrina tore apart many of the casinos, he said this time the buildings are still intact.
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The casinos may reopen with thermal temperature scans of employees and staff, masks, social distancing placement of slot machines and with buffets closed or dramatically changed.

“Everything from how often we clean to how we greet our guests could and will change,” said Bill Hornbuckle, chief executive officer of MGM Resorts International, parent company of Beau Rivage Resort & Casino in Biloxi. “Our casino floors will look different and our restaurants ultimately will be impacted as well,” he said in a video message.

While the casino operators are eager to reopen, Crosby said, “The last thing we want to do is to open up and have something happen.”
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Looking at how the casino industry has bounced back from other disasters, the coronavirus is the first disruption that has affected the whole world at the same time, Robert Heller, CEO of Spectrum Gaming Capital, said during a webinar Thursday.

He thinks this recovery will be slower than after Katrina, he said, in part because customers are going to be frightened to return.

It was four months after Katrina that the first casinos reopened in South Mississippi. It wasn’t until the 1-year anniversary that the Beau Rivage, the largest casino in Mississippi, reopened and revenues bounced back to near pre-Katrina levels.

While many Coast casinos were closed in 2005 and part of 2006, the inland casinos in Mississippi had a surge in business, said Geoff Atkinson, senior data analyst at Management. He said a similar bounce could happen if one state reopens casinos while they are closed in a neighboring state due to the coronavirus.
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During the national recession that began around 2007, the Las Vegas strip decline was substantially greater than other markets, said Heller, because it is a destination market where half the visitors arrive by air.

“The lack of visitors was painful,” he said.

Heller said these experiences show, “...regional markets are going to perform better and gamblers will gamble.”
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This is another article, not about Vegas, but about one place's plans for opening up. It gives us a look into how quickly, or slowly, it is likely to happen.

This Vice headline sums it all up:
The Fun Will Come Last: Reopening Canada Is Gunna Suck
https://www.vice.com/en_ca/article/7kzgjd/coronavirus-canada-reopening-will-suck

Days continue to blur together as people around the world stay at home and avoid real-life interactions with others in a mass effort to fight the coronavirus. By now, everyone’s been wondering when freedom will resurface and life will get back to normal, if ever.
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Experts have said the fight against the coronavirus likely won’t end until a vaccine is developed and distributed widely. But if enough people get sick, recover, and develop a "herd immunity" (providing the virus doesn’t mutate), or if testing and tracking increase significantly, further laxing of physical distancing could follow as well, they say.
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Loosening the grip on physical distancing has to be incremental, Koch said, and efforts have to prevent an opportunity for increased infections.

At the onset, it’s likely governments will allow for most medical procedures to resume, such as going to the dentist or chiropractor.

Koch said restaurants and cafes might start to reintroduce dine-in services, as long as they can ensure customers will sit far enough apart from one another.

"For many places that would mean taking out half of the tables, half of the bar stools," Koch said.

Once a limited number of sectors or businesses are reopened, Canadians will have to wait between two and three weeks (the maximum incubation period of the virus) to see whether the move causes a spike in cases, Koch said. If infection rates don’t grow, governments can loosen their grip a little more.
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Some experts think travel will restart as early as the summer, and road trips will be allowed before flights. Others say it’s too soon to tell when people can move around freely. Trudeau has also said the U.S.-Canada border likely won’t open soon either, so it’s hard to say when we’ll be vacationing in the U.S. again. International travel is dependent on how and when countries decide to reopen their borders—which depends on virus rates reported elsewhere.

Subsequent phases will come into play depending on the success of the first reopenings, slowly introducing services like gyms, child care, and outdoor facilities such as tennis courts and basketball courts, and will allow progressively larger crowds to gather.
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All businesses will have to either ensure physical distancing can take place on their premises or will have to implement screening measures at the door.

Governments could ask workers who can do their jobs remotely to continue to work from home until the virus is more contained, Janes said.

"If and when the WFH-ers do head back in, the office life they once knew will likely be gone, replaced by largely empty floors, with few if any meetings and elevator rides, and everyone in masks," VICE reported.
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Major entertainment events that draw large crowds—sports, theatres, concerts—likely won’t come back for a long time.

"Those are the potential super spreading events we’d want to be cautious about," Janes said.

Pride festivals, Canada Day events, the Calgary Stampede, and Toronto’s Caribbean Carnival have already been cancelled this year.

But some organizations are conceptualizing ways to move events online. Toronto International Film Festival announced that it’s considering hosting a digital version of its annual festival this year. Even the NBA is trying to figure out how to reinstate the league with physical distancing measures.

While mass sporting events will likely remain on pause for the foreseeable future, people might be able to enjoy some recreational sports soon. Golf courses, parks, and camping grounds are already scheduled to reopen in Saskatchewan between May 15 and June 1.
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Ultimately, there is still a lot of unknown associated with the virus, so it’s hard to look too far into the future, Koch said. Researchers still need to figure out whether the virus mutates, how long people who have recovered from the virus stay immune, and how many strains exist.

When asked how long physical distancing will stay in place, Koch said there was only one answer: "We don’t know."

What we do know, is we’re in for the long haul before life gets back to normal, if it ever does.
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Ohio's reopening plan, includes everyone wearing masks:

Sisolak: Nevada shutdown could be extended
https://www.8newsnow.com/news/local-news/sisolak-nevada-shutdown-could-be-extended

Here at home, some Strip properties are preparing to welcome back visitors, but Governor Sisolak says he’s relying on advice from medical experts to decide when the silver state can reopen.

It’s been more than one month since hotels and casinos on the Las Vegas Strip have been boarded up because of the COVID-19 pandemic. While the shutdown in Nevada is scheduled to last through the end of April, it could be extended.
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“No one wants to reopen more than I do,” Governor Sisolak said. “I’d love to tell you it’s April 30, through May 5, or May 15, or whatever that date is. In good conscience, I can’t give you an arbitrary date that I can’t commit that I think we have a good chance of reaching.”

Governor Sisolak has consistently said he’s relying on scientific data and advice from medical experts to determine when to open things back up. His biggest concern is jumping the gun.

“I would hate to open up a week or two, early to cost us three or four months more delay, when we have to shut it back down and say, okay, now we’ve got a massive spike again,” Governor Sisolak said.
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The Governor says a consistent drop in COVID-19 hospitalizations over a 14-day period is one major criterion for reopening.

“In the meantime, please stay home, stay safe and stay healthy,” Sisolak advised.

Other criteria for reopening include maintaining sufficient healthcare capacity and the ability to protect our vulnerable populations.
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Reopening Las Vegas Too Soon Risks More Than A New Wave Of Infection
https://lasvegassun.com/news/2020/apr/26/reopening-las-vegas-too-soon-risks-infections/#.XqW7G0AjzvE

Health experts say there is no way of knowing if the declining rate of infections Nevada is experiencing will bounce back up if social distancing and other precautionary measures now in force don’t continue.

That’s why Sisolak still hasn’t announced a concrete date as to when so-called nonessential businesses would be allowed to reopen. He continues to maintain that the risk of lifting the shutdown isn’t worth the potential setbacks in containing the virus. The last thing anyone wants to have, Sisolak said this week, is to reopen the state only to have to shut it down again, which could bring even more harm to Nevada’s economy and health care infrastructure.

“Arguing that the curve is flattening and that we can immediately lift restrictions in one fell swoop is like arguing that the parachute has slowed our rate of descent so we can take it off now,” Sisolak said. “We cannot take off the parachute. Experience gleaned from other countries teaches us that we cannot flip a light switch and turn our lives and our economy back on too quickly. We still have a responsibility to protect people and to protect our economy.”
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The only way to know for sure if the spread of the virus is truly slowing down is through expanded testing, which should happen as early as this weekend in Clark County, Labus said. Testing not only indicates the direction cases are heading, he said, but where Nevada is on the curve.

“Even though we’re potentially decreasing, if we’re still at the peak of that outbreak, it’s still too early to reopen,” he said. “When you hear the fire is contained, that’s not when you stop fighting the fire.”
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“It takes up to two weeks for people to get sick, and then it takes time for them to get care and actually get tested,” he said. “The stuff we’re looking at now is based on the things we did three-plus weeks ago. Things have changed since then, and you have to make sure we’re on that path and it’s not just a few good days.”
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Social distancing measures have severely cut the chances of widespread infection in Nevada, said State Epidemiologist Melissa Peek-Bullock. In a presentation Tuesday, she indicated that a positive coronavirus patient would potentially cause 406 people to be infected within a 30-day period. By limiting exposure by just 50%, that same person would cause 15 people to be infected within that same 30-day period.
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While Nevadans should celebrate the lower number of cases and deaths, these results did not happen by chance, said Dr. Shadaba Asad, medical director of infectious disease at University Medical Center.

“This virus is not behaving any differently in Nevada as it is in any other state in the country,” she said. “We haven’t discovered any treatments that are effective against the virus and we don’t have a vaccine, so the reason we are seeing a lower number of deaths and cases is because of the (social distancing) measures in place. These measures, that seem so simple, so innocuous, are actually the ones resulting in these changes.”

State leaders also need to consider how the rest of the country is containing the virus when formulating a plan to reopen, particularly with Las Vegas relying so heavily on tourism, which before the pandemic, would increase the population by 20-25% daily with people from out of state, Labus said.

“We can’t think of Nevada as an isolated state,” he said. “People are going to cross back and forth one place to another, and our industry is dependent on other people coming from those other states. So even if we can do an amazing job of stopping every case of disease here, if people are coming to Nevada from a place that hasn’t done that, that presents a risk to us.”
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When the state does reopen, it’s not going to be all at once, Asad said, adding that social distancing and hygiene measures and even wearing cloth masks will likely continue until there is a vaccine.

Resorts will be putting their reputation on the line once they do eventually reopen, said Stephen Miller, an economics professor at UNLV.

“It’s not in their interest to reopen and then close down again,” he said. “That will destroy confidence of tourists even coming here. “
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Even with incremental reopenings, a full economic recovery by this year is increasingly unlikely, some economists say. It is more likely the country will see a “W-shaped” recovery, where the economy starts to look better, only to have a second downturn later in the year. This potential second downturn could be triggered if the economy is reopened too soon, causing another spike in deaths from the virus.

“Pretending the world will return to normal in three months or six months is just wrong,” Diane Swonk, chief economist at Grant Thornton, told the Washington Post on Wednesday. “The economy went into an ice age overnight. We’re in a deep freeze. As the economy thaws, we’ll see the damage done as well. Flooding will occur.”

Clark County Chairwoman Marilyn Kirkpatrick, whose board has jurisdiction over the Strip and the rest of unincorporated Clark County said that while the increase in testing would put the community in good standing to contain the virus, she was in no hurry to allow nonessential businesses to reopen too soon.

“We want to do this methodically and we want to ensure that we only have to do it once,” she said. “We are working with the state and have supported our governor 100%. It is our responsibility as the Clark County Commission to reopen the Las Vegas Strip and to ensure that we do that right.”
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And lastly, I'd like to point you all to this video posted by JoeTall on Twitter.
https://twitter.com/JoeTall/status/1254666353409024000
He says it is filmed at Margaritaville Resort Casino in Bossier City, LA. But there is a good chance that Las Vegas is looking at these table dividers too.

I took a few screengrabs from the video for those who don't want to click:

It's just more indication that when Las Vegas reopens again, whenever that is, it is going to look a lot different from the Las Vegas you saw on your last trip. I have seen a few people here, who are talking about being ready to head back, but also unwilling to wear a mask, get a temperature check, participate in social distancing, or need to see a show or eat a buffet. I hope that you all are reading this and hedging your expectations. I think Vegas is going to be strange for some time to come. Even if they are somehow able to open in the next 2-3 months, it is going to be a very different experience, IMO.

I'm anxious for things to return to normal again too, but I also have my expectations set very low. I don't think we're going to see any real kind of normalcy until we have a vaccine, or some other way of treating or eradicating this virus.

That's it for now. Thanks for reading!

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