COLUMBUS – While the state is not requiring COVID-19 vaccinations for high school athletes, Gov. Mike DeWine and other officials are encouraging students participating in all extracurricular activities to get vaccinated.
“We have a tool now that will almost guarantee, when it’s used, that teams will have a full season, that athletes will be able to compete and their biggest worry will not be COVID; their biggest worry will be the team they’re preparing for or the athletes they’re preparing for, to compete against,” DeWine said during an appearance at Thomas Worthington High School on June 18.
DeWine, state medical director Dr. Bruce Vanderhoff and Ohio High School Athletic Association Director Doug Ute encourage Ohio high school student athletes to get a vaccine.
“I encourage everyone to get the vaccination so we can go back to life when kids aren’t 10 feet apart on the sidelines and athletes can high five and hug each other when they make a good play,” Ute said.
The state reported on Sunday that over 5.5 million Ohioans had received at least one dose of a vaccine and 5.05 million, or 43% of the state’s total population, was fully vaccinated.
Ohio ranks 31st nationally in overall child well-being for the second year in a row, according to an annual report from the Annie E. Casey Foundation, and advocates say it highlights the need to ensure post-pandemic support for children and families are adequate.
The foundation’s Kids Count Data Book found that 18% of Ohio kids lived in poverty in 2019, compared with 23% in 2010.
Alison Paxson, communications associate with the Children’s Defense Fund-Ohio, notes those gains could be erased as many households struggled to make ends meet over the past year.
“We will be feeling this for our state economy for years to come and for generations to come,” she said. “So we really have to make sure that our policies right now are looking at the long term; that they’re visionary, bold and deliberate; and that they’re prioritizing the recovery of hard-hit communities.”
Census Bureau data estimates 23% of adults in Ohio reported difficulty in paying for usual household expenses and the pandemic only made the situation worse for children living in high-poverty areas, children without health insurance and children whose parents lack secure employment.
Census data reveals that during the pandemic, Black families in Ohio struggled more than white families to pay housing costs and put food on the table.
Ohio’s unemployment rate increased to 5.0% in May from 4.7% in April as employers shed nearly 15,000 jobs.
Most of the job losses came in the service sector.
Despite months of recovery, Ohio still has 321,000 fewer jobs since COVID-19 struck, according to Michael Shields, a researcher with the progressive-leaning think-tank Policy Matters Ohio.
“While preliminary numbers are subject to change, the trend of the last few months is clear: Ohio’s recovery has slowed to a crawl, leaving out hundreds of thousands of Ohioans,” Shields said.
However, data released Monday by the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services shows that there were 589,000 fewer unemployed Ohioans last month than a year earlier, at the depths of the pandemic shutdown, when offices, factories, stores, bars and restaurants closed or laid off workers.