COLUMBUS, Ohio — The Ohio Department of Health reported 11,885 new COVID-19 cases in the state today, over 3,000 more cases than the previous single-day record. It's a number that Gov. Mike DeWine said is inflated by a backlog of cases from two of the state's biggest labs. There have now been a total of 363,304 total cases in Ohio.
The number of new cases today is significantly higher than the rolling 21-day average of daily cases, which is 6,733. These numbers include both cases confirmed by a viral test and cases that meet the CDC's definition of probable. There have been 344,054 confirmed COVID-19 cases to date, which account for 94% of total cases.
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"There has to be an asterisk by this," DeWine said about Monday's daily case number. "The big, big picture is that the high volume of these cases is now overwhelming the system — not only overwhelming the Department of Health system, but it's also causing some problems in regard to the laboratories and getting all this information through. So there's two things going on. And once I explain it, you're not going to know exactly what the number is, but the number is high and this number has been averaging about 8,500 cases per day."
DeWine explained that Monday's jump in new cases is due in part, or perhaps wholly, to the fact that the labs at two of the state's biggest healthcare systems - Mercy Health and Cleveland Clinic - did not report results for two days over the weekend.
The other problem, DeWine said, is a backlog of antigen and antibody tests, which, while less accurate than viral tests, are used to determine probable COVID-19 cases, along with another piece of evidence of COVID infection.
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"There is now about 15,000 of these backed up, we estimate, and that's an estimate, about three-fourths of those will ultimately be cleared. And because many of those — a good number of those— are antibody, they come together in the system," DeWine said. "We are at a very high — certainly a very historically high — high level, and we hope in the...next few days to get all this cleared out so we can give you the exact numbers each and every day."
There have now been 6,020 coronavirus-related deaths across the state; 24 new deaths were reported today, lower than the 21-day average of 32.
Cleveland reported 308 new cases, bringing its total to 10,032.
The ODH reported 282 new hospitalizations today, with 36 ICU admissions, both above the 21-day average.
As of today, 230,678 Ohioans are presumed recovered from the disease, according to the ODH.
There were 58,876 tests done on Nov. 21, the latest day this data from the ODH was available. Of those tests, 12.8% were positive, compared to the rolling 7-day average positivity rate, which is 13.5%. Click here for details on where to get a COVID-19 test in your area.
The median age of patients is 42 with the age range for infected patients from younger than 1 year old to 109 years old.
View more COVID-19 data visualizations from News 5 here.
View more data from the ODH on their COVID-19 dashboard here.
Note: Some of the charts above are updated with new data daily, and after 24 hours, may not reflect the statistics at the time this story was published.
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