Ohio’s long-running COVID restrictions will come to a close Wednesday, ending a chapter in state history filled with state mandates, business shutdowns and political controversy.
On July 22, 2020 Gov. Mike DeWine extended Ohio’s mask mandate to all counties, regardless of the severity of the health crisis in each community.
Prior to that it was based on a county-by-county approach, with the masks ordered in only the counties with the most coronavirus cases.
Then, DeWine ordered a change of policy. “It is essential that we wear masks statewide to contain the virus,” said DeWine during one of his statewide briefings.
That brought even more protestors to the statehouse who accused DeWine of everything from being a globalist who is anxious to control people across the state, to a power-hungry politician out to rule over working people.
DeWine defended his moves, saying they were based on science, not politics.
In March at the one-year mark in the pandemic, DeWine set a metric to determine when the health orders would end. It was to come when the number of coronavirus cases would reach 50 per 100,000 people for two weeks.
When the measurement began it was at 179. But instead of going down, it went up to 200 cases per 100,000 in mid-April before beginning to decline in later weeks.
The most recent data from the Ohio Department of Health puts the number at 97.1.
Clark County Health Commissioner Charles Patterson said the change will be like a light switch in some cases with people, but added everyone still needs to be cautious.
“Although the orders come off, the recommendation of the C-D-C still say that people should be careful moving forward. We don’t want to rush forward with no caution whatsoever. Unfortunately we can’t predict what’s going to happen when the light switch is flipped on Wednesday because so far all of our predictions have been wrong when it comes to the coronavirus,” Patterson said.
Ohio Health Director Stephanie McCloud said some very focused restrictions will remain for nursing homes and assisted living facilities.
“There will still be some mitigation measure in place for long term care facilities that we will still be looking for ways to protect the most vulnerable population for ground zero for COVID,” McCloud said.
Will all masking go away?
Commissioner Patterson said we should expect masking to remain for some people a while longer.
“We need to be open to people masking for some time to come. And we need to understand if they choose to mask but 95 percent of other people aren’t masking that we should respect that and we should allow them to do what they feel comfortable with,” Patterson said.
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