Cincinnati's current and incoming mayors are expected to outline how city government is tackling the pandemic going into the new year at a briefing this afternoon.
The briefing was scheduled in the wake of the leadership of the Cincinnati region’s hospitals describing their workers as exhausted, overwhelmed and apprehensive as winter approached. Flu is on its seasonal rise, and a new variant of the coronavirus named omicron has been found in Ohio and Northern Kentucky.
The briefing by Mayor John Cranley and Mayor-elect Aftab Pureval comes as COVID-19 cases are rising sharply in much of the Cincinnati region.
A key measure of the pandemic – a rolling average of new COVID-19 cases in the last seven days – is nearing the level in Hamilton County that it was at this time in 2020. The measure has increased 78% in the last week and 197% from three weeks ago, an Enquirer analysis of Johns Hopkins COVID-19 Case Tracker data shows.
Pureval will be sworn in on Jan. 1 to succeed Cranley, the two-term mayor who now is running for governor of Ohio. Also scheduled to appear at the City Hall briefing are City Manager Paula Boggs Muething and Health Commissioner Melba Moore.
Cincinnati’s pandemic conditions have risen and fallen since the public health emergency was declared in March 2020. A vaccination campaign allowed case counts to drop after last winter's surge until the beginning of August.
Since then, case numbers have climbed in the city, while vaccination rates remain stubbornly low in neighborhoods due west of downtown and in larger northern neighborhoods such as Winton Woods.
The city health department’s dashboard reports that as of Dec. 7, for every vaccination given a Black resident, more than two white people have been vaccinated.
Across the 16-county region, nearly 50% of all residents have gotten at least one dose of vaccines that first became available a year ago, an Enquirer analysis of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows.
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