(The Center Square) – A newly released report from the Nevada Department of Health and Human Services (NV DHHS) said it may take a long time to recover from the economic, education and behavioral health impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic.
While states have comparable stories, Nevada had over 900,000 cases, and more than 12,000 people died in the state.
Meanwhile, businesses were shuttered, especially in 2020, after Gov. Steve Sisolak declared a state of emergency.
Jobs and wages suffered as a result.
The damage was so extensive that researchers say “most industrial sectors were negatively impacted by the number of jobs and wages that were lost due to these closures.”
Even though remote learning helped combat the spread of COVID-19, NV DHHS said it caused problems for school-age children.
“The impact of remote learning can be seen through student’s assessment results on the NAEP and the ACT,” says the report.
“Symptoms of the Disease: The Epidemiological, Economic, and Public Health Impacts of COVID-19 on the Battle Born State.”
Students in elementary school had the biggest problems, with scores dropping just over six points for fourth graders. Middle and high school students were also found to have been negatively impacted by COVID-19, but NV DHHS says it was not to the same extent.
Geoffrey Lawrence, Director of Research at Nevada Policy Research Institute, said restrictions on personal freedom implemented by then-Gov. Steve Sisolak represented a panicked attempt by his administration to respond to one type of risk while ignoring all other risks.
“In reality, we live in a world of numerous uncertainties, but people have been able to adapt to these uncertainties by developing elaborate, entrepreneurial systems to produce and deliver to people the things they need to overcome the challenges presented by the natural world,” said Lawrence.
In pre-modern times, Lawrence says pestilence, famine and disease were all quite common events, to say nothing of the reduced quality of life individuals experienced for lack of education, individual rights, or material abundance.
Nevada’s response to the pandemic harkened back to this pre-modernity by embracing what Lawrence calls “fear of a new uncertainty as a rationale to break all the systems society has developed” to grapple with these many other existing uncertainties.
“It’s therefore no surprise that economic uncertainty abounded, student achievement plummeted, deaths of despair surged, and hundreds of thousands of previously self-sufficient Nevadans were left to rely on a dysfunctional public support system that couldn’t even process claims timely just to meet their basic needs,” said Lawrence.
“A better role for government during COVID would always have been to advise and inform of the risks inherent with the disease so that free individuals could take the precautions they deemed necessary.”
For example, Lawrence said it was known very early on that people had different risk profiles based on things such as age and health status.
They also had different risk tolerance.
Because of this, Lawrence argues that an informed populace would have been able to weigh this new risk against a wide variety of existing risks we all face on a daily basis.
“Elderly individuals and those with existing comorbidities could have been encouraged to take extra precaution, without prohibiting young children from attending school, for instance.”
The Sparks Fire Department investigated a strong odor at Northern Nevada Medical Center in Sparks on Wednesday evening.
A spokesperson from NNMC confirmed the reason for the Fire Department’s presence.
As of 8:05 p.m., fire crews had checked all the floors at the hospital and found nothing.
The spokesperson says the odor is still present but it is slowly dissipating.
LAS VEGAS, Nev. (FOX5) – The Southern Nevada Health District said two cases of the West Nile virus was confirmed.
Wednesday, the district sent a press release that a male, over the age of 60, was diagnosed with a non-neuroinvasive form of the illness and another, over the age of 70, had a neuroinvasive form.
The district said both patients have recovered.
The health district previously reported in early June that over 3,000 mosquitoes tested positive for the West Nile virus.
As of June 21, officials say 230 mosquito pools, 7,493 mosquitoes from 30 ZIP codes, tested positive for West Nile virus. Nine mosquito pools, 267 mosquitoes from five ZIP codes, tested positive for the virus that causes St. Louis encephalitis.
The Health District’s Fight the Bite campaign calls on people to:
For more information, visit their website.
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Last month, Sen. Roger Marshall (R-KS) pledged to block all legislation brought to the Senate floor, except, of course, for the Credit Card Competition Act, a giveaway to some of the largest corporations in the world.
The CCCA will allow large retailers like Amazon and Walmart to pad their bottom line by slashing interchange fees – the cost of processing a transaction – on credit cards. The idea is that by lowering those fees, corporations can pass on those savings to consumers, however, we all know after four years of corporate price gouging disguised as inflation that those savings are unlikely to make it back to you. The truth is this bill is a billion-dollar giveaway to big box retailers that will cost consumers billions of dollars in increased credit card fees and lost rewards.
We know that this bill won’t lower costs for consumers. When Congress implemented a similar policy to cap debit card interchange fees in 2010, consumers did not see any savings even though large retailers did. Nearly all retailers either kept prices the same or even raised them, according to a study from the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond. As a result, mega retailers have been able to rake in more than $100 billion, and counting, while consumers did not pocket any savings.
I am also worried this bill will harm Nevada’s tourism industry, which depends on consumers who use their travel rewards points to book flights and stay in our local hotels. About 1 in 3 Americans have travel rewards cards and in 2022 alone, more than 800,000 tourists used their rewards to visit our state. They generated an economic impact of more than $1.16 billion here in Nevada, according to Airlines for America. That is money spent supporting our countless small businesses, dining in our local restaurants, and contributing to our overall economy.
Unfortunately, if this bill becomes law, consumers in Nevada and all over the country can say goodbye to rewards programs as they know them, since these are funded by the existing interchange system. Once banks and credit unions start seeing major interchange revenue drops, cash-back rewards, hotel points, airline miles, and other perks tourists use to visit Nevada will either be significantly cut back or eliminated altogether. Any change that will decimate rewards programs, increase credit card fees, and make travel more expensive will directly hurt Nevada’s bustling tourism industry and the small businesses that rely on it to stay afloat.
We can also learn from countries who have already made this mistake. When the Australian Reserve Bank implemented a similar policy on their credit cards just a few years ago, Australian consumers saw the value of their rewards points plummet by nearly 25%. They also lost access to no-fee credit cards and now pay hundreds of dollars in credit card fees every year. We can expect Nevadans to pay more in credit card fees and for their rewards points to plummet in value if this legislation passes.
Moreover, a study conducted by the University of Miami shows the country’s five largest retailers – Amazon, Walmart, Home Depot, Costco, and Kroger – are expected to pocket $1.2 billion from this bill. It’s no wonder why they’re lobbying Congress to pass it. Just like with the Durbin Amendment, Nevada consumers are not expected to see a dime of these savings.
Republican Sen. Roger Marshall is intent on making the Senate nonfunctional by blocking all bills – unless of course there is a way to benefit multi-billion-dollar mega-retailers. With the annual National Defense Authorization Act, multiple funding measures, and other must-pass pieces of legislation on the horizon, he is going to have plenty of opportunities to try and jam this through. We can’t let him win.
For the sake of Nevada consumers and our state’s tourism economy, I urge Nevada’s Congressional delegation to shut down this lobbyist handout to mega retailers.
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