Recent editorials of statewide and national interest from Ohio newspapers:
Hazard pay for health workers
Toledo Blade
April 20
The cheers from strangers, the free cups of coffee, the handmade signs from children are all lovely gestures of appreciation for health-care workers putting themselves in harm’s way to take care of coronavirus patients.
But as heartfelt as all those sincere gestures are, they are not enough to make up for dangers these professionals are facing in an unprecedented crisis.
President Trump has said he is considering a plan for “hazard pay” to adequately compensate America’s health-care workers. Ohio’s Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown followed up on the President’s suggestion with a letter urging Mr. Trump to support including hazard pay in a second coronavirus relief bill.
“These are really brave people,” the President said. “We are asking the hospitals to do it and consider something, including bonuses, and I think they’re entitled to it. If anybody is entitled to it, they are.”
Mr. Brown and Ohio’s Republican Sen. Rob Portman both believe the recently approved $2.2 trillion coronavirus bill will be just the first in a series of measures Congress will have to approve to help the country through this unprecedented crisis.
Any subsequent bill should include money for health-care-worker hazard pay.
The long hours and surge of the coronavirus patients on the horizon are daunting enough. But health-care workers are taking care of their communities without adequate personal protective equipment. They are risking their own health and the health of their families to do their work.
So far about 20 percent of the Ohioans who have tested positive for the coronavirus are health-care workers. The doctors, nurses, and other health-care workers who go to work every day know this, and yet they go anyway.
Getting through the pandemic is frightening for all. For most of us, though, getting through it means staying home and staying safe. For health-care workers on the front lines, it means facing great risk with every shift. That’s a hazard none of them signed up for, and they should be compensated for it with more than our thanks.
Online: https://bit.ly/2yyXZFO
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COVID-19 worries don’t slow Trump EPA’s assault on environment
The Columbus Dispatch
April 20
For anyone looking for a silver lining in the coronavirus pandemic and the federal government’s chaotic response to it, it won’t be in the fact that a public health crisis has diverted the Trump administration’s attention from its ceaseless drive to roll back every major law and rule protecting America’s air, water and public health.
No, the U.S. EPA under former coal lobbyist Andrew Wheeler hasn’t paused its assault on the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act. Unfortunately, fewer people than ever are paying attention.
On Thursday, the EPA abandoned a policy that justifies restrictions on the release of mercury by power plants, linked to asthma and brain damage in children.
On Friday, the news concerned PFAS compounds - known as “forever chemicals” because they linger in soil, water and the human body for years without degrading. This prolongs human and wildlife exposure to chemicals that increasingly are linked to liver damage, thyroid disease, cancer and other ailments.
The change related to mercury doesn’t eliminate the current emissions, but it sets the stage for greater pollution in the future by making it harder to justify the cost of new regulations.
Under the Clean Air Act, the EPA weighs the cost of a new regulation - about $9 billion spent annually by electric utilities on smokestack-scrubbing equipment in the case of the mercury rule - against the public benefits such as fewer premature deaths.
When instituting the rule in 2012, the Obama administration’s studies showed only a $6 million annual benefit from reducing mercury alone. But the mercury-reducing equipment also produced “co-benefits” - limiting sulfur dioxide, fine particulate matter and other pollutants that harm human health.
Adding those co-benefits, the Obama administration found that the rule would prevent 4,700 heart attacks, 130,000 asthma attacks and 11,000 premature deaths each year, for a benefit of $80 billion over five years.
Wheeler and the Trump EPA now are calling this a “dishonest” accounting, saying that only “direct benefits” should be counted when calculating the effect of a rule.
There’s no logic in that position and certainly no humanity; Wheeler’s EPA typically doesn’t deny that its actions will cost lives. A proposal for a different regulatory rollback, involving carbon dioxide, acknowledges that it would cause as many as 1,400 additional premature deaths per year.
In the case of PFAS chemicals, the Trump EPA actually has moved to protect Americans, developing a rule to limit their use in consumer products. In 2018, it declared that doing something about the compounds was a “national priority.” The White House, however, apparently has other ideas.
Sen. Tom Carper, D-Delaware, said Friday that he has documents showing that the White House has been pressuring the EPA to substantially water down its PFAS rule. That effort reportedly has been led by Nancy Beck, formerly a top scientist with the American Chemistry Council, a chemical industry lobbying group.
Asked about Carper’s charge, an EPA spokeswoman told the Associated Press that there’s nothing unusual in the agency “consulting with other federal agencies.”
Unfortunately there truly is nothing unusual in the Trump administration serving the wants of big corporations at the expense of public health, public safety and the environment.
And Beck, the scientist working to keep “forever chemicals” in Americans’ nonstick frying pans, carpets, paints and food packaging? She is Trump’s nominee to lead the Consumer Product Safety Commission.
Online: https://bit.ly/34PdHsy
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Let science determine when to reopen Ohio
Cincinnati Enquirer
April 15
At some point, businesses in Ohio have to reopen. People need to go back to work. Students must return to classrooms. But the decision to reopen businesses, schools and other public places must be guided by science and the best data available from health experts. Relaxing protective measures too early could lead to a new spike in COVID-19 cases, wiping out the hard-earned gains of the past month and costing more lives.
Ohio has fared better than many states in terms of coronavirus cases (7,280) and deaths (324) through Tuesday afternoon. Original forecast models used by Ohio Department of Health Director Dr. Amy Acton predicted a peak of 10,000 new COVID-19 cases per day by mid-April. Those projections have dropped sharply in recent days to 1,607 new cases per day.
Credit Gov. Mike DeWine and Acton’s quick, no-nonsense decisions to close schools, bars and restaurants, cancel events and issue a stay-at-home order. The best science and medical data available guided those policy decisions, and they should continue to be DeWine’s primary influencers.
Ohio’s economy cannot limp along forever, however. Big businesses are losing millions of dollars and some small businesses might not reopen at all once this crisis has abated. Thousands of Ohioans have been laid off or furloughed from their jobs. The longer restrictions remain in place, the tougher the slog back to solid financial footing will be for many.
But the big question is how and when can the governor reopen Ohio safely without sacrificing the gains made so far? The highly contagious virus is still a conundrum to doctors and scientists, testing and protective equipment remain woefully inadequate and a vaccine could be at least a year away. All these factors make nailing down a specific timetable for reopening the economy difficult.
Removing the stay-at-home order too soon could have dire consequences as places such as Hong Kong are finding out. At the beginning of March, Hong Kong seemed to have the virus under control, with just 100 cases. The city returned to life as normal, but by the end of the month saw the number of COVID-19 cases jump back up to 715, prompting the government to impose new restrictions.
There is a chance Ohio could see similar flare-ups of the disease if we open up too many places too soon. Reopening businesses only to have to close them again in a few weeks because of a surge in the number of cases could be just as devastating as the present course.
DeWine is right to slow-walk us back into a sense of normalcy. People have to be confident the virus is under control in order to come out and start using services again. Any plan to reopen the state’s economy must be done in collaboration with our neighbors in Kentucky and Indiana. Poor planning and a lack of caution in one place affects us all.
Economic and business experts should have a voice at the table too, but the governor must hold them accountable for having plans for sanitation, social distancing and other measures to protect their customers and employees before any restrictions are removed. And while hospital capacity is not an issue right now, DeWine must ensure that our hospitals and health care systems are prepared for possible spikes when economic activity revs up.
Online: https://bit.ly/2Vo69Kp
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Ohioans deserve complete, accurate coronavirus numbers
Akron Beacon Journal
April 19
There’s no doubt Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine and Ohio Department of Health Director Dr. Amy Acton both deserve praise for their proactive moves to save lives in recent weeks.
With the coronavirus beginning to spread rapidly in our communities, they listened to the science and facts, made bold decisions at the right moment and managed to get most Ohioans to accept social distancing as a necessary reality.
While we’ll never know how bad the pandemic could have become, it’s clear serious COVID-19 illnesses and deaths have been greatly reduced. Nor has Ohio’s health system been overrun to date as we saw in New York City or Italy.
Unfortunately, what’s been glossed over in DeWine and Acton’s daily briefings is the timeliness of the state’s data and its decision to withhold facts we believe are critical to understanding what’s really happening.
For weeks, the DeWine Administration and most county health departments have been suppressing basic information on the impact of COVID-19 at long-term care facilities despite a promise to be “transparent’ as recently as Monday.
Too few centers have voluntarily and publicly reported their struggles with keeping patients safe from this deadly virus. Of course, the presence of cases does not mean the staff provides poor care. It’s a reality of the danger posed by an invisible enemy, especially to the elderly.
Responding to media pressure, on Monday, DeWine said Acton would issue an executive order requiring such facilities to tell patients and their families within 24 hours when a patient or staff member tests positive for COVID-19. This should have been the standard since day one.
DeWine’s announcement was greeted as good news by many, but it quickly went south after the governor conceded the next day that lawyers had gotten involved. It took three days for ODH to post a list of more than 800 cases and confirm that about 10 percent of all cases statewide involve long-term care workers or patients.
But reporters asking the seemingly simple question of how many Ohio deaths were related to long-term care were met with refusals, with both state and county health officials incredulously claiming the release of such information would violate federal privacy laws.
A few, including Stark County, did eventually share some information, disclosing at least 31% of Stark County COVID-19 cases were in long-term care facilities. Altercare of Alliance has been forthcoming with information and made officials there available to the media before it was disclosed the facility had 55 cases of coronavirus.
Wayne County, to its credit, volunteered that the first five deaths there involved one facility.
The Portage County Health Department did not see the need to inform its citizens even though a surprising 24 deaths had been reported there as of Thursday. We later learned from a Kent Health Department presentation to City Council that “approximately 17” Portage deaths involve long-term care facilities.
An independent count of nursing home deaths statewide shows there have been at least 87 deaths as of Friday, based on research by the Repository and other newspapers. That’s at least one-fifth of all deaths.
These numbers are important to understanding who is getting and dying from COVID-19, facts that probably gave residents - especially in Portage County - some level of reassurance that the general population is faring as well as elsewhere.
That doesn’t mean anyone can stop social distancing as DeWine made clear in his statements Thursday about reopening Ohio in phases beginning May 1. Life will not return to normal for many months or perhaps until next year when a vaccine is expected to become available for widespread use.
Health leaders have built considerable public trust in recent weeks by openly and calmly sharing facts. They’re going to need every bit of that faith to stop people from resuming their normal lives too soon in the weeks to come.
We can’t shut the state down again.
Online: https://bit.ly/2XVz8H1
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