Ohio — Masks are “our ticket out” of the COVID-19 health crisis, Gov. Mike DeWine said Friday, a day after he unveiled the case metrics that would trigger the end of the mask mandate in Ohio.
The governor was asked to address moves by Texas and Mississippi to end all health orders, which rippled into loudening calls in Ohio for DeWine to follow suit.
“We're going to follow the science and the science clearly tells us that these masks work phenomenally well,” he said Friday afternoon at Cleveland State University, the future site of the state’s largest mass vaccination clinic. “I'm not going to comment about what other states are doing. My job is to be governor of the state of Ohio.”
The governor defended his statewide mask mandate against Republican critics who are demanding the governor allow Ohioans to take them off.
He said the state’s experiences with school reopenings and the relatively low transmission rates in classrooms are evidence of “just how powerful the masks are.”
“Our ticket out is to continue to wear this mask and to vaccinate. So it's vaccinate, vaccinate, vaccinate; Wear a mask. That's how we get out of this,” DeWine said.
The governor has been taking heat this week from Ohio politicians, including Rep. Jim Jordan and U.S. Senate candidate Josh Mandel, who say it is time to reopen Ohio now.
In a Thursday evening address, DeWine rejected those calls, but he offered the conservative wing of his party a bit of the news they were looking for, announcing that all health mandates will come off when Ohio drops below 50 cases per 100,000 people for two weeks.
The governor took questions Friday after making a major announcement that Ohio will open 16 mass vaccination sites this month.
The largest will be the Cleveland State site, which is expected to launch on March 17 with federal resources, according to a joint announcement by the state and the White House Friday morning. Officials said Friday the news of the federally-backed clinic means about 300,000 additional vaccines are coming to Ohio this spring.