COLUMBUS, Ohio — Ohio hospitals continue to grapple with the coronavirus, and some are holding up better than others.

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

Each week, Spectrum News 1 speaks with Eye on Ohio: Ohio Center For Journalism about the latest hospital bed data. The organization collects the latest data from the state health department and looks for possible trends.

Lucia Walinchus, the executive director for Eye on Ohio, said the overall trends continue to be positive, but there are parts of the state facing a strain on facilities.

For the last two weeks, when hospitals in the area were most stressed, there were only 114 hospital beds available in Cleveland. That's the least amount of available beds that area has experienced since Eye on Ohio began tracking the data in November.

Walinchus said it's important to not only look at the overall numbers, but the numbers specific hospitals are reporting in each region of the state.

"We're not just looking at overall numbers. We've always had access to those overall numbers. We wanted to know hospital by hospital because this is the data (officials) are looking at when they look at, 'Where should we put vaccinations? Where should we put all of these other things?' And, so it's really important for us to have access to what government leaders are looking at and kind of be empowered by that information to say that this one area is really kind of suffering from that shock."​

The state health department releases the latest data to Eye on Ohio each week.

According to the Ohio Department of Health as of March 10, there have been 51,211 cumulative hospitalizations with the median age of 67. Ohio hit its peak in hospitalizations at the end of November, with more than 400 patients being admitted in a single day. On Tuesday, there were only nine hospitalizations in the entire state. 

As for Cuyahoga County, where Cleveland is, hospitals there had nearly 50 patients admitted in mid-December, and as of Wednesday, only one patient was admitted. 

But Cuyahoga County has been one of the hardest-hit areas of the pandemic. It's the second county in the state for the most cases recorded behind Franklin County, with more than 97,000 so far. It's first in the state for deaths, with more than 1,800 lives lost. 

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