In March 2020, the lights went out, and the Las Vegas Strip became a ghost town. More than a year later, tourists finally returned to the resorts, casinos, and night clubs as COVID restrictions were lifted and life slowly returned to normal. COVID had different plans, though, as the Delta wave arrived in summer of 2021 before it was rapidly displaced by Omicron leading into 2022.

This episode takes a "deep dive" into the impacts of tourism on wastewater-based epidemiology in Las Vegas. The influx of tourists in the summer of 2021 led to a major surge in SARS-CoV-2 in Vegas wastewater, which made it difficult to accurately assess public health conditions among locals. But the arrival of Omicron actually helped quantify how much of the virus these tourists were contributing to Vegas wastewater.

This is an AI-generated podcast created with NotebookLM based on a publication in JAMA Network Open. The original article is available here: https://doi.org/10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2023.0550