TOLEDO, Ohio — On Thursday, May 14, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine announced several more openings in the coming weeks, including campgrounds and public pools.
On Friday, restaurants will be able to have outdoor dining. Indoor dining will take place next week.
Each day, the Ohio Department of Health releases the latest numbers on COVID-19 infections. The numbers can be overwhelming, and taken out of context, scary.
Total infections in the state of Ohio as of May 14 are 26,357. But it's important to understand that is a cumulative total, meaning many of those cases go back to the early days of March and many of those people are no longer infected. It's also important to realize that many people in prisons and nursing homes have been tested, even without symptoms. At Marion Correctional, more than 2,000 inmates tested positive, but more than 95 percent were asymptomatic. Many of those who tested positive have yet to show any symptoms.
It can be alarming for many people to see the daily numbers continue to be high. At this point, the 21-day average is 555 new cases per day. On Thursday, the number of new cases was 646. However, to add context to those numbers, testing is much more widespread now. A month ago, the number of tests administered was roughly 2,000 a day. DeWine hopes to be testing more than 20,000 a day by the end of May. More testing means more positive tests, but it doesn't mean that all those people are showing severe symptoms.
The 21-day average for deaths is 42, but that number, again, does not tell the entire story. It does not mean that 42 people died on the day the number is posted. Death reporting often lags by weeks. When I talked to Lucas County Health Commissioner Eric Zgodzinski at the end of April, he said some of the previous day's numbers were from April 1.
It is also telling to look at the demographics on the deaths in Ohio. The median age of death from the virus is 80. The virus has been rampant in nursing homes. Lucas County leads the state with 94 nursing home deaths. No one under 18 has died in the state, four between the ages of 20-29 have died, and 37 younger than 50 have died.
The numbers we really want to focus on are the hospitalization and ICU admission numbers. Death reporting lags, but hospitalizations tell us how many people are currently being hospitalized and also those in serious condition.
On Thursday, May 14, there were 953 COVID-19 patients in Ohio hospitals. That number is down from 1,067 on May 1. The number of ICU patients has dropped from 411 to 360. Those on a ventilator have fallen from 265 to 253.
At this point, the numbers are trending downward. But COVID-19 has an incubation period of 2 to 14 days, meaning that as the state reopens in the weeks ahead, health experts are expecting those numbers to spike at the end of May or the beginning of June. The key will be to see how high the spike goes.