Ohio opens sports, entertainment venues

State also changes its data reporting system to improve its accuracy.

Attending a concert or ball game as a fan will be allowed but at less than a third of venue capacities, according to a new public health order effective Tuesday.

Indoor venues will be allowed to operate at 25% of seated capacity while outdoor venues can operate at 30%.

Spectators will be seated in pods of six people or fewer. Each pod will be at least 6 feet apart from each other. Face masks will be required.

Ohio is also lifting the 300-person limit on banquet centers.

This week marks one year since Gov. Mike DeWine took the first steps to shut down mass gatherings to mitigate the spread of the deadly coronavirus. The first event in Ohio that was limited was the Arnold Sports Festival in Columbus, which was closed to spectators but allowed to continue with 22,000 athletes from more than 75 countries.

The state also announced this week that Ohio’s COVID deaths will be updated twice weekly instead of daily as the state shifts to a new system in the wake of underreporting more than 4,000 deaths.

The COVID-19 dashboard will look a little different to Ohioans who check it regularly but the data will be more accurate, according

to Ohio Department of Health Director Stephanie McCloud.

All COVID deaths will be confirmed through death certificate information, which can take weeks to several months to be finalized. Ohioans might see some fluctuations in death data as the switch is made to the new system.

Previously, the state health department had to manually reconcile death data as it was added to the COVID19 dashboards. This led to a greater risk of error, McCloud explained.

“We were engaged in a manual process that attempted to provide information in real time,” she said. “Manual processes are fraught with more opportunities for mistakes and human error.”

Aside from improving the COVID death reporting, the DeWine administration is asking lawmakers to approve $25 million in the proposed state budget to upgrade antiquated information technology systems so that health data can be collected, analyzed and displayed in real time.

The first step is to address the death reporting and then look at the larger IT upgrades, McCloud said.

“We are trying to solve, in the midst of the crisis, a reliability in our death reporting data. That is the genesis of this change,” McCloud said. She likened it to trying to build a plane as it is flying. “We would love to land this thing but some of the larger, overarching issues will have to wait until we land the plane. And we are determined to land this plane safely.”

The state recorded 1,709 daily COVID cases Tuesday, bringing Ohio’s total to 970,583. Hospitalizations increased by 121 for a total of 50,503. Ohio reported 12 ICU admissions, bringing the total to 7,160.

As of Tuesday, Ohio has reported 16,750 total deaths attributed to COVID-19.

Nearly 15% of Ohio’s population, more than 1.72 million people, has received one dose of the coronavirus vaccine and just over 8%, 938,600 people, has com- pleted the vaccine.