COLUMBUS, Ohio — In a virtual briefing Thursday morning, Ohio Department of Health Director Dr. Bruce Vanderhoff, said in the last week COVID hospitalizations across the state increased 22%.
He and other doctors said the concern is not so much about the capacity to care for the increase in patients, it’s about having enough staff to care for patients.
Dr. Vanderhoff was joined by Dr. Joe Gastaldo of OhioHealth who said health care workers are physically and mentally fatigued.
He said there is frustration that many of these hospitalizations are preventable as most cases involve patients who are not fully vaccinated for COVID-19.
“The pathway to the pandemic ending is getting vaccinated,” said Dr. Gastaldo.
“The way out of this pandemic, in fact, the way out of any pandemic, is for immunity,” added Dr. Vanderhoff. “The most reliable way to gain immunity is vaccination.”
In Ohio, case numbers are up following the Labor Day weekend and with many students going back to school.
As many school districts across the state have returned to the classroom, many students are having to quarantine after COVID-19 exposure.
“So many schools that have opened and have not taken our guidance to heart,” said Dr. Vanderhoff. “Many of those that opened without those safety measures in place are now placing those safety measures in their schools.”
Dr. Vanderhoff and Dr. Gastaldo both stressed the importance of keeping kids in the classroom as opposed to virtual learning. They said there are safety measures in place to make this work, safety measures we’ve relied on from the beginning of the pandemic; masking, social distancing, and hand washing.
“This really all comes down to all of us thinking very carefully and seriously about COVID 19 as a respiratory virus that is very infectious,” said Dr. Vanderhoff.
When it comes to the new variants detected across the country, mu and lambda, Dr. Vanderhoff said both have been detected in Ohio but at “very, very low proportions.”
“The last numbers that I have show mere fractions of a percent,” he said.
Dr. Vanderhoff said the two variants don’t appear to be growing in the face of the delta variant, detected in nearly all of the samples tested through genomic sequencing by the state.