Ohio Department Of Health Director Suggests Over 100,000 Ohioans Have Coronavirus Right Now

Ohio Department of Health Director Dr. Amy Acton, standing next to Ohio Governor Mike DeWine, claimed on Thursday that over 100,000 people in the state have the coronavirus, which originated in China.

“This is certainly an unprecedented time,” Acton said. “It is this one in 50 years pandemic that we’ve been planning for, we talk a lot about in my over 30 years in public health, but we have never seen a situation exactly like this.”

“We know now, just the fact of community spread, says that at least 1%, at the very least 1% of our population is carrying this virus in Ohio today,” Acton later claimed. “We have 11.7 million people, so the math is over a 100,000. So that just gives you a sense of how this virus spreads and is spreading quickly.”

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Ohio Department of Health Director Dr. Amy Acton: “We know now, just the fact of community spread, says that at least 1%, at the very least 1% of our population is carrying this virus in Ohio today. We have 11.7 million people, so the math is over a 100,000.”

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8:00 AM - Mar 13, 2020

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PARTIAL TRANSCRIPT:

This is certainly an unprecedented time. It is this one in 50 years pandemic that we’ve been planning for. We talk a lot about in my over 30 years in public health but we have never seen a situation exactly like this.

We talked yesterday about the steps we’re taking in the playbooks we’re following, but I really have to commend our Governor Mike DeWine and our lieutenant governor, these are the hard decisions and believe me there’s no one exact right, exact perfect, but the steps we’re taking now will absolutely save lives and I’ll go over again why it’s so important that it changes the impact on our health care system.

First of all we do have five positive cases as the governor mentioned our fifth case is a 55 year old male near where I grew up, Trumbull County, and he is in the ICU. This is a man who has a family and kids who are also quarantined and many contacts and our local health departments are busy at work letting folks know if they have been in contact with this gentleman. We have 30 negative tests but at this moment, when I came in, 52 people under investigation and as I said before those rings and rings are out there I can’t tell you the number of contacts right now it’s in the hundreds that are also being told to self quarantine. so, this ripple effect I’m seeing spread throughout Ohio, it is counties far and wide and and we do most definitely have community spread.

I know it is very very hard for us to get our heads around this and we’re all sort of waking up to our new reality and one of the things we’re going to begin to put on our website, we began today, are a series of fact sheets and checklists to help you kind of figure out what is this new norm going to be like so I really want people to stay tuned for that. We are basically slowly shutting down most of the our structures of society, we’re asking people to stay at home in the hopes that they don’t engage in this logarithmic spread of disease as the governor said that was such a key clue to this. It doubles every six days and if you think about it, everyone who’s not spreading it, me not spreading it to two to three other people and those two to three other people going out, that is how we can slow this down. It’s so crucial the moves we’re making in the next two to three days and all our pandemic plans we hope to do these measures I’ve talked about a little more slowly but as we can see we’re in a crisis situation now we’re moving quickly taking decisive action now will greatly slow down this disease and stop this trajectory.

We know now, just the fact of community spread, says that at least 1%, at the very least 1% of our population is carrying this virus in Ohio today. We have 11.7 million people, so the math is over a 100,000. So that just gives you a sense of how this virus spreads and is spreading quickly.