Ohio reported a huge jump in the number of people who died from COVID-19, with 752 deaths added on Friday.
Ohio Department of Health director Stephanie McCloud says 428 of those deaths are Ohioans who died out of state.
“They are Ohioans who have listed their primary residence as Ohio, but they’ve gone somewhere," McCloud explains. "We don’t know if it was short term, long term, could be snowbirds who have gone to Florida. We don’t know where they contracted the virus, but they passed in another state."
Friday was the first time that Ohio updated its death total since Tuesday, when Ohio changed the way it tabulates COVID-19 deaths. Under the new system, Ohio records numbers from death certificates that have gone through a CDC reporting process, which is slower but more accurate.
Up to that point, the state attempted to process death certificates manually through a reconciliation process in order to get the numbers out faster, but determined it was too error-prone after 4,200 deaths went uncounted.
With Friday's numbers added, Ohio now reports a total of 17,502 fatalities from COVID-19 since the pandemic began.
