Among the excruciating choices he’s had to make in the coronavirus epidemic, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine addressed one on Thursday. He said that with limited resources, he’d have to prioritize fighting the disease over helping low-income Ohioans facing increasingly desperate circumstances.
Some advocates for the poor said, however, said that is a false choice; that the more unstable vulnerable Ohioans become, the tougher it will be to check the spread of COVID-19.
Even before the start of the pandemic, the number of poor Ohioans was higher than many Ohioans would expect, with more than a quarter of the state’s population enrolled in Medicaid, the federal/state health plan for the poor.
When the pandemic came, it hit low-income Ohioans particularly hard, infecting them at greater rates, putting many out of their service jobs and forcing others to stay home out of health or child-care concerns, or both.
Then at the end of July, a $600 federal weekly unemployment supplement expired days after a moratorium on evictions did.
Already, usage of Ohio food banks has taken a big jump, and evictions are expected to increase markedly once a 30-day notification period ends Sept. 1.
“So far, it hasn’t been outrageously high numbers,” said Bill Faith, executive director of the Coalition on Housing and Homelessness in Ohio. “But I think that it’s going to begin to change once we get to Labor Day and it’s going to get worse progressively and the only way to address this effectively is to give people resources to get their rent paid.”
Meanwhile, the Ohio Public Utilities Commission has given the go-ahead for electric utilities to start disconnecting customers next month for being behind on their bills. Some natural gas utilities already are.
“We’re just coming to that time where we’re going to see evictions and the utilities are able to disconnect, the federal pandemic unemployment program has expired. we just feel like there’s a crisis coming, said Susan Jagers, director of the Ohio Poverty Law Center.”
Congress, which is at a stalemate over more coronavirus relief, is on vacation until Sept. 8. State officials and advocates have been calling for lawmakers to return to Washington, D.C. and act now, but there’s no sign of that happening.
To help fill the vacuum, the group Advocates for Ohio’s Future is calling on DeWine to expend $243 million of the more than $1 billion the state has in unexpended coronavirus relief to alleviate what it sees as the coming crisis:
- $100 million in emergency rental assistance
- $38 million in utility assistance
- $45 million in food and basic needs assistance
- $60 million for child care
In a press conference Thursday that was dominated by questions about youth sports, DeWine was asked about whether he would or could provide funding that advocates say is needed to keep a large portion of Ohioans from tipping over the brink.
“We are not unmindful of the merit of the request,” he said. “But I think our fundamental goal has to be to keep the virus down, because nothing else can happen if we don’t keep the virus down.”
The governor emphasized the importance of testing capacity in doing so and the money needed to achieve it.
“We have to make sure we have enough money set aside to get us through what may be a rough winter,” DeWine said. “We don’t know, but some of the experts I’ve consulted nationwide have said November, December and January could be very, very, very rough with the flu coming back and people all indoorsk at the same time the virus is spreading. So that is an imperative for us: to make sure we have the money for the tests.”
On Twitter, one advocate said the argument seemed reasonable, but it contained an important oversight.
“Gov. says controlling virus must be priority for $. It’s a fair answer,” wrote Graham Bowman, an attorney with the Ohio Poverty Law Center. “My response is it’s not an either/or. It’s a both/and. Controlling the virus isn’t possible amid a homeless crisis.”
Bowman then added, “Anyone who has ever worked in extreme poverty knows that contact tracing and testing will be impossible. If you lost your apartment for non-payment of rent then you probably stopped paying Verizon long ago. It just won’t work without basic social stability.”
***
Also from Ohio Capital Journal:
Inside the 19-year-old database tracking COVID-19 in Ohio
When the Ohio Disease Reporting System began tracking contagion in the Buckeye State, Harry Potter hadn’t yet made it to the big screen and people listened to music on CD players.
Clinical labs, local health departments and Ohio hospitals pour data on the more than 112,000 COVID-19 cases in the state into ODRS, which makes its way to the Ohio Department of Health’s coronavirus website. The database tracks a wide spread of other infectious diseases from cholera to Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever.
ODH deployed the database in September 2001. It was set to be replaced this fall, though the plan was shelved due to the pandemic that has killed nearly 4,000 Ohioans since March.
The complexities of responding to an outbreak of a virus that can kill victims and spread asymptomatically has revealed key blind spots in the system. READ MORE
