COLUMBUS – Gov. Mike DeWine had an abrupt response to a conservative lawmaker’s proposal to impeach him over his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Have at it,” he said during his Tuesday afternoon coronavirus video briefing from his Cedarville home. “If members of the General Assembly want to spend their time on this, they certainly have every right to do that.”
DeWine said lawmakers should turn their attention to more pressing issues, such as gun violence and police reform.
The proposal to impeach him may have been the most brazen legislative attack on the first-term governor to date. Yet lost in the fury over Rep. John Becker’s move was the fact that many GOP Ohio lawmakers strongly disagree with DeWine’s response to the coronavirus.
House and Senate lawmakers have introduced well over a dozen bills since March attempting to limit DeWine’s ability to respond to the virus through the issuance of public health orders and other emergency measures.
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The first public release of testing data from Ohio State shows that fewer than 2% of the 7,719 students, faculty and staff tested earlier this month were positive.
The university’s COVID-19 dashboard shows that 80 students, or 1.16% of those tested from Aug. 14-Aug. 22, were positive and 12 of the tests on faculty and staff performed between Aug. 1 and Aug. 22 were positive, or 1.44%.
The data includes both surveillance testing to measure the rate of COVID-19 in asymptomatic students as well as testing among students who sought tests because of symptoms or another reason.
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Ohio crossed a sad milestone in the COVID-19 pandemic Wednesday: 4,044 people have died from the disease.
The state reported 1,089 new confirmed and probable cases for a total of 117,584 with 15,717 active cases.