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Ohio is heading into winter already in a COVID surge

By: Karen Kasler | Statehouse News Bureau
Posted on: Wednesday, November 24, 2021

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COLUMBUS, Ohio (Statehouse News Bureau) — Ohio attorney general Dave Yost has announced he’s signing onto a lawsuit by more than a dozen states against a COVID vaccine requirement by Medicaid and Medicare for health care workers.

But the state’s health agency is still pushing the message that vaccines are the best way to beat COVID as they worry about what’s ahead.

Case numbers and hospitalizations are up in the last few weeks, and nearly 5,200 people in Ohio have been reported to have died of COVID in just the last two months.

Ohio Department of Health director Dr. Bruce Vanderhoff said there’s no way to predict what the next few months will hold.

“We are headed into the winter with very high levels of disease transmission, and over the last couple of weeks, a definite upturn in the number of cases and the number of hospitalizations. So essentially, we’re heading into the winter already in a surge.”

But Vanderhoff said communities with high vaccination rates are seeing much lower virus activity rates, so he said there’s hope.

Just under 56 percent of Ohioans over 5 are fully vaccinated.

ODH reports 36,938 unvaccinated Ohioans have been hospitalized since January 1 of this year. And that number has more than doubled since July 27. And there’s been a ten-fold increase in hospitalizations among vaccinated people in the last four months.

11,647 unvaccinated Ohioans have died of COVID since the start of the year. But nearly half of those deaths were reported in the past four months. And of the 543 vaccinated Ohioans have died this calendar year, over 93% of breakthrough COVID deaths this year were reported after July 27.

Yost’s decision to join the lawsuit over the Medicare/Medicaid vaccine requirement is the latest action his office has taken against the Biden administration. He’s also filed suits over the “vaccine-or-test” requirement for companies with more than 100 workers and for federal contractors.

Last week, Republican representatives passed a bill that would ban COVID vaccine mandates, vaccine exemptions and proof of vaccination status or “vaccine passports”. But that bill is considered unlikely to move forward in the Senate or, if it does, to be signed by Gov. Mike DeWine.