Follow Dewine’s lead to stay safe and save lives
If Ohio were a teenager making life-threatening poor choices, Gov. Mike Dewine is the exasperated parent who knows the better path forward and prays the stern talk he just delivered will scare his child straight.
So listen up, Ohio: Our individual and collective response in the coming days will be the difference between us becoming Florida or New York, between raging illness or controlled progress to beat back the most challenging health and economic crisis of our lives.
Don’t listen to the Eddie Haskells in the Ohio General Assembly who masquerade as champions of our liberty but in reality are inviting in the killer coronavirus whose infiltration the governor is striving to thwart.
There is only one true route out of this increasingly dangerous period and that is through the commitment each and every one of us must make to protect ourselves, our families and each other with dedicated adherence to the precautions preached by medical and health professionals.
To remain healthy, to continue the reopening of our economy, to allow something close to a normal life: Wear face masks in public, keep a safe distance from others, wash hands frequently and quarantine if symptoms arise.
The Dispatch applauds the governor for delivering a desperately needed message of individual and collective responsibility in a statewide televised primetime address Wednesday. We repeat and fervently implore every Ohioan to heed his warning: “Our future truly lies in our own hands.”
And our disappointment and great concern cannot be overstated for those who continue to contest the governor’s leadership and challenge his sciencebacked pleas for Ohioans to exercise personal responsibility in this global pandemic.
In the Statehouse and in the White House, it is unconscionable that Dewine has had to fight fellow Republicans who have downplayed the danger of the coronavirus scourge and endanger all of us by blocking the transmission of sound medical advice.
We need only review the four-month history of this pandemic in our own state to verify the soundness of the governor’s plea for widespread compliance.
In early March, before most of us recognized the threat on our doorsteps, the governor teamed up with Mayor Andrew Ginther to shrink virus exposure by shutting down public participation at the Arnold Sports Festival — one of the first such decisions in the nation. Then Dewine made courageous decisions in mid-march to shutter schools, before any other governor had taken that step, and to issue stay-home orders, which soon became inevitable nationwide.
Those moves kept the creep of coronavirus and the COVID-19 disease it causes at a slower trajectory in Ohio than it would have otherwise tracked. Predictably, the gradual reopening of the state in May and June, at the insistence of business advocates and naysaying fellow Republicans, has brought us to the brink of calamity with cases now surging at record levels.
This is no time to doubt the data. This is no time to politicize a health crisis that respects no boundaries other than those we can throw up with face masks, social distancing and frequent handwashing.
It is up to every Ohioan, every American, every inhabitant of this planet to recognize the dangerous path we are on.
There is a right way forward, and Gov. Mike Dewine has laid it out. Now we all must follow it. And if Ohioans don’t, we call upon Dewine once again, as we did last week, to swiftly mandate masks statewide and consider other restrictions to force the issue and save lives.
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