Ohio has marked an important milestone in the COVID-19 pandemic: For the first time, the Ohio Department of Health reports the number of people who have received at least one dose of COVID vaccine outnumbers the total coronavirus cases in the state.
The state’s health department says as of Thursday afternoon, 935,383 Ohioans had received at least one dose of either the Moderna or Pfizer vaccines, the two drugs currently available. That’s almost 25,000 more than the 910,847 people who are reported to have contrcted COVID-19 since the beginning of the pandemic.
The pace of vaccination is also far outpacing new cases. On Thursday, the Ohio Department of Health said that 27,469 people had received the first vaccine dose in the last 24 hours, while 4,120 people were newly diagnosed with COVID-19.
That’s not the only positive indicator. Ohio Hospital Association President and CEO Michael Abrams says hospitalizations are down.
“We are detecting improvement: 2,380 people from Ohio are in the hospital today. For comparison, in mid-December, more than 5,300 were hospitalized," Abrams said Wednesday. The next day, that number had fallen even further, to 2,252 hospitalizations.
So far, over 11,500 Ohioans have died from COVID-19.
