COLUMBUS, Ohio — As Ohio starts the process to slowly reopen the state, Governor Mike DeWine wants everybody to remember life isn’t going back to normal anytime soon.
“We’re trying to get this economy moving forward, but at the same time we have to be just exceedingly careful,” he said during his daily press conference Wednesday afternoon. “The virus is still very much out there. It’s not gone away. It’s not going to go away for a while.”
Those comments came when he was asked what Ohioans can do when encountering people who aren’t taking social distancing seriously.
“The way it travels is still the same," DeWine said. "If you have people grouping together, one can spread it to the other. I guess the thing I would ask our fellow citizens to remember is even if you’re not sick, even if you don’t feel bad, you could be carrying it.”
He also declared “there’s a lot about this virus we don’t know" as we move forward with the first phase of reopening Ohio.
“We’ve got to have the discipline as we start back and get jobs opening up, which is what everybody wants. At the same time, we can’t be foolish. At the same time, we can’t lose our discipline about the social distancing. We’ve got to be careful. There’s a reason that we did not really change the stay-at-home order. There’s a reason that we did not change the number of people that can gather together, it’s 10 people. We kept those. That was a signal we hope to send to people across the state of Ohio that they have to continue to be careful.”
Although some businesses have been given the green light to start reopening in the days ahead, Gov. DeWine is still urging employees to continue working from home “as much as humanly possible."
NOTE: DeWine's comments featured in the video at the top of this story were made during his press conference on April 27.
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