The governor of Ohio said Sunday he wouldn’t be surprised if schools would be closed for the remainder of year due to concerns over the spread of the coronavirus.
Gov. Mike DeWine (R-OH) appeared on CNN’s “State of the Union” with fill-in host Brianna Keiler to discuss what he was doing in his state to protect residents from the coronavirus, which has killed 57 people in the United States so far, though no one in Ohio has died so far. Keiler told DeWine that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said “that school closures of 2-4 weeks are actually unlikely to have an impact on mitigating the spread of this virus.” She then said she wondered whether Ohio schools would be closed for the remainder of the school year and asked if it was possible.
“Absolutely,” DeWine responded. “This is all projections. I’m just going by what medical experts are telling us. This may not peak until the latter part of April or May. So, we’ve informed the superintendents while we closed schools for three weeks, that the odds are this is going to go on a lot longer and it would not surprise me at all if schools did not open again this year.”
The odds are “this is going to go on a lot longer and it would not surprise me at all if schools did not open again this year,” Ohio @GovMikeDeWine says about the long-term impact of the coronavirus. #CNNSOTU pic.twitter.com/i0luWcQVzX
— State of the Union (@CNNSotu) March 15, 2020
At a news conference on Friday, DeWine announced that Ohio now had 26 confirmed cases of coronavirus – 12 women and 14 men. He said seven people have been hospitalized but no one has died, WLWT5 reported. He also announced that starting Monday, Ohio k-12 schools, including public, private, and charter schools, would be closed for three weeks in an attempt to prevent the spread of the virus, though he added this would not apply to Ohio’s child care systems, the outlet reported.
“We have a panel of 14 doctors,” DeWine told Fox News host Sandra Smith. “We also reached out to other experts yesterday and it was clear that we had to take this action in regard to our schools.”
DeWine also announced that all public gatherings of more than 100 people would be banned for the time being. He said he has been relying on “experts” who have said that every six days the number of projected undiagnosed cases will double.
“You just think about that,” he mused. “We are in some tough times in Ohio. And, it’s very, very important for us to do everything we can do slow this down.”
On Thursday, Fox reported that top health officials in Ohio announced there were an estimated 100,000 undiagnosed cases of coronavirus in the state. Dr. Amy Acton, director of the Ohio Department of Health, said the “virus is among us, but we can’t see it yet.”
“Just the fact of community spread says that … at the very least 1% of our population is carrying this virus in Ohio today,” she said, as reported by WDRB. “We have 11.7 million people … so the math is over 100,000. So that just gives you a sense of how the virus spreads, and is spreading quickly.”