COLUMBUS – Nursing home residents and staff in Ohio are among the first in the nation to receive COVID-19 vaccines.
The shots will be administered Friday through Walgreen’s, CVS, PharmScript, and Absolute Pharmacy.
Ohio was invited by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to participate in a scaling up of the federal program.
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Columbus Public Health and Franklin County Public Health extended their stay-at-home advisory until Jan. 2 to coincides with the extension of the state’s 10:00 p.m.-5:00 a.m. curfew.
The advisory took effect on Nov. 20 due to high case numbers and community spread.
“Case numbers and hospitalizations continue to be at very high levels in our community. Hope is on the horizon with the COVID vaccine, but it will take time and the next few weeks are critical to reducing community spread and saving lives,” Columbus Health Commissioner Dr. Mysheika Roberts said.
Residents are advised to stay at home as much as possible and to only leave home to go to work or school or for essential needs, such as medical care, or to pick groceries, medicine or food.
Residents also are strongly advised not to have any guests in their homes unless they are essential workers, including for the holidays, and to limit meetings and social events to 10 individuals both indoors and outside.
“As we continue to celebrate the holidays, we recognize not having guests in your home or going to visit others is very difficult,” Joe Mazzola, Franklin County Health Commissioner, said.
Although the number of Ohio counties considered to be suffering from “severe exposure and spread” of the coronavirus has fallen to just one, all 88 have experienced a level of spread that is at least three times more than what the CDC considers high incidence, Gov. Mike DeWine said during his regular Thursday COVID-19 briefing.
Only Richland County is at Level 4, or “purple,” under the state’s Public Health Advisory system, but DeWine says the top 20 counties show rates of spread nine to 13 times the high-incidence level. Several counties were downgraded to Level 3, but DeWine cautioned that a decrease from Level 4 to Level 3 does not indicate that the situation is improving but rather that indicators, such as hospitalizations, are plateauing at a very critical level.
“Red and purple are not all that different. They both mean that a county has a very high level of cases and a very high level of COVID activity in the healthcare system,” he said. “Purple simply indicates counties where things are worsening noticeably, but red counties are also at very worrisome and unsustainable levels.”
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The state reported 11,412 new confirmed and probable cases of COVID-19 Thursday, but that figure is inflated because a technical problem prevented a complete count of Wednesday’s cases being posted. DeWine says the average number of new cases Wednesday and Thursday was 8,411. Ohio’s 7-day rolling average of daily new coronavirus cases rose to 9,236 on Wednesday.
The total number of cases confirmed since the pandemic began rose to 596,178 with 7,894 deaths. The 117 additional deaths reported Thursday was much higher than the three-week rolling average of 77 cases per day.
There were 370 additional hospital admissions, meaning that COVID-19 patients occupy 18.5% of the state’s inpatient capacity.
The seven-day rate of positive coronavirus tests was 14.4%.