COLUMBUS – Ohio’s top health official delivered some encouraging news about the surge in COVID-19 cases due to the omicron variant.
“There is light at the end of the tunnel for us in Ohio,” Dr. Bruce Vanderhoff, director of the Ohio Department of Health, said during a briefing Thursday morning.
After reaching a pandemic-era peak of 6,749 on Jan. 10, the number of patients in Ohio hospitals due to COVID-19 has dropped every day for 16 days, Vanderhoff said, though the state is still reporting an average of 20,000 new cases daily.
The department has recommended that local health departments shift their practice of COVID-19 contact tracing to a model that follows clusters of cases and not individual diagnoses.
Vanderhoff says that the instruction to local health departments would cover outbreaks in crowded settings such as homeless shelters, correctional facilities and nursing homes.
He said he has also notified schools that they too can discontinue universal contract tracing but should still plan to help health departments trace clusters of a coronavirus outbreak.