Hospitalizations have remained around 580 to 630 inpatients for at least the past two weeks in the region.
Kettering officials stressed the importance of getting vaccinated, calling the recent spike in hospitalizations “a crisis”.
“This is serious folks,” said Mayor Peggy Lehner Lehner a Kettering City Council meeting Tuesday night. “We have to take this as a crisis.”
Lehner and Councilman Bruce Duke said they both know people who’ve died of COVID in the past week. Duke also noted that fewer than 60% of Montgomery County residents have started the COVID-19 vaccine.
“If you know those folks, if you are one of those folks, I plead for your lives,” Duke said. “This is serious.”
Southwest Ohio — which includes Butler, Warren, Adams, Brown, Clermont, Clinton, Hamilton and Highland counties — had 959 COVID patients in its hospitals and 193 in its ICUs, according to ODH. Overall, there were 4,996 people hospitalized with COVID in Ohio Wednesday. It’s the first time in at least two weeks that inpatients dropped below 5,000.
In the past week, Dayton Children’s Hospital had 68 patients hospitalized with COVID, according to the hospital. The patients ranged in ages from 7 days to 21 years old. Eight of the patients are being treated in the PICU.
Of those hospitalized, 85% of patients admitted who were eligible for the vaccine were not vaccinated, according to Dayton Children’s.
Daily cases were artificially inflated Wednesday after a reporting error resulted in ODH underreporting cases on Tuesday. Ohio added 20,752 cases on Wednesday and 4,163 cases Tuesday, according to the state health department. Over the last three weeks, Ohio is averaging 20,383 cases a day.
“Testing data from laboratories across the state is automatically submitted to ODH through an [electronic laboratory reporting] system that feeds into the Ohio Disease Reporting System. ODH received five incorrectly formatted ELR files from a long-term care facility around 5 p.m. on Jan. 24,” read a statement from ODH issued on Tuesday.
The invalid data caused a backlog in the state’s processing systems, which then delayed the processing from other facilities.
As of Wednesday, 61.17% of Ohioans have started the COVID vaccine, including 71.24% of adults and 65.02% of those 5 and older. More than 56% of the state’s population, including 65.87% of adults and 59.7% of people 5 and older, have finished it, according to ODH.
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