COLUMBUS, Ohio — The number of available hospital beds across Ohio is holding steady in the face of the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.

What You Need To Know

  • Eye On Ohio, The Ohio Center for Journalism fought the state for access to the number of available hospital beds and other equipment related to COVID-19

  • Eye On Ohio filed a lawsuit in the Court of Claims of Ohio in order to obtain the requested information

  • In November, Judge Patrick M. McGrath ruled the Ohio Department of Health must provide the requested information

Last week, Lucia Walinchus the Executive Director of Eye On Ohio: The Ohio Center for Journalism said while most of the state remained steady, hospitals in the Akron area saw decreases in the number of available beds.

On Wednesday, the data reported improvements in the number of available beds throughout hospitals in the Akron area and remained steady in much of the state. 

"So Akron, good news. It's starting to edge up a little bit," Walinchus said. "Last week they had a high of 345, a low of 48. The week before, they had a low of 23, so it's getting a little bit better. Cleveland is easing down a little bit. Last week, they had a high of about 700 and a low of about 200. Cincinnati still seems pretty steady, so overall, good news. It doesn't seem like we're having this exponential growth that we expected and obviously as we expect with more and more people getting the vaccine, I think we're up to about 11 percent now, hospitalizations have slowly started to taper off and our capacity seems to be holding steady."

While much of the state reported positives, Walinchus said Columbus is bearing the current brunt of the virus.

"Feb. 10, there was a high of 500 [hospital beds] and a low of 379," she said. "Their highs are usually about 1,500, so this is quite a bit lower, although this is still pretty steady. Columbus's ultimate low was Nov. 8 when it only had 64 beds available."

Numbers are reported by the state to Eye On Ohio each Wednesday.