By Friday afternoon, a little over 21% of Ohio’s 18,743 COVID-19 patients were located inside state correctional facilities — institutions that have, like nursing homes, struggled to contain the pandemic while housing large populations in close quarters. In many situations, it simply can’t be done.

Many Ohio prisons and jails, including the one in Hamilton County, have opted to take a chance: Release low-level, non-violent inmates to create more space for those who remain incarcerated.

RELATED: Ohio prison head denies claims of inadequate care, 'chaos' in hard-hit facilities

It’s often the safest available solution for the jail. For the inmate, however, it can replace old problems — the fear of infection, the stress of confinement — with new ones.

“It’s stressful when you come out,” said Trina Jackson, who helps formerly incarcerated people reintegrate with society at the Hamilton County Office of Reentry. “If you don't have the family connections or any other connections to help you with housing and things like that, you're going to need help.”

She provides it. Her team members work to connect their clients with housing, jobs, addiction treatment services and mental health care. Since the pandemic and emergency releases began, she said, they’ve seen an uptick in demand for their services.

Work might be the most challenging piece of the puzzle, especially during and after the pandemic-induced economic downturn.

“A lot of times our returning citizens are the last hired and first fired,” Jackson said. “And so when everyone starts to get back to work, who's going to hire them first?”

There are no easy answers, but she hopes for more success stories like former inmate Dennis Rose. He runs a sober living house in the West End, and he said Friday he’s proud of the progress he’s made since his incarceration.

“I got a job,” he said. “I’m on time for my job.”

That’s the goal for all of them.

While the recently released search for their place in the outside world, 36,954 more inmates remain quarantined behind bars. Twenty-eight have died.

School districts across the state of Kentucky scuttled their back-to-school plans on Aug. 10, when Gov. Andy Beshear announced his official recommendation that the state’s public school students learn from home until at least Sept. 28.

With less than a week left until the academic year begins in Boone County, parents still aren’t sure what lies ahead or what they should be doing to get ready.

“We don’t really know what’s going on,” said Chelsea Fisch, whose three sons attend three different Boone County schools.

RELATED: Here's what back-to-school will look like in Boone County's public schools

Her high-schooler will start classes on Aug. 25. Which classes? Good question — he hasn’t received his schedule.

“I’ll probably be scrambling this weekend,” Fisch admitted.

Another Boone County mother, Heather Eggleston, said her fifth-grader still doesn’t know who his teacher will be when he logs on to his first day of online classes.

And others across the district have been struggling to prepare for virtual learning, ensure their children have internet access and report problems with students’ school-issued smart devices.

“This is not the way we like to operate,” assistant superintendent James Detwiler said Wednesday. “Obviously, we know that this is a hardship on the families.”

Until Beshear’s announcement, the district had planned on a blended learning model: Students in classrooms for one half of the week and learning online for the other. Detwiler said Boone County schools are doing their best to pivot and be responsive to families’ needs.

If a family doesn’t have access to Wi-Fi, “we will set them up in some way, and we have agencies that work with us to make sure students have what they need,” Detwiler said.

He added that high schoolers should expect to receive an email or phone call containing their schedule on Thursday or Friday. Elementary and middle schoolers, who have the same teacher all day, will know who it is by Friday.

Families in need of help with their child’s computer, Wi-Fi or school meals should call their child’s school directly, Detwiler said.

CINCINNATI — Construction of the Banks riverside music venue resumed Friday after a two-week pause caused by a property-rights dispute between the city of Cincinnati and Hamilton County.

Jean-Francois Flechet, who owns the Taste of Belgium restaurant chain and anticipates an uptick in Banks-area business when the venue opens, was happy to hear it.

“It’s in everybody’s interest to get that moving on,” he said.

City-county disagreements have dogged the venue’s construction from the start, leading to delays and intergovernmental standoffs over parking lots, parking garages and the role of the Bengals in shaping riverfront development.

Taxpayers aren’t on the hook for the cost of building the venue itself — it’s privately funded. However, taxpayers do cover the estimated $36 million cost of public infrastructure around it.

Delays contribute to that cost, City Council member David Mann said Friday.

“We've saved some tax dollars by reaching an agreement,” he said. “If we continued with disagreements, construction would have been delayed, and that would have cost more money."

The city and county have each blamed the other for various delays. The work-stoppage and eventual restart this time hinged on the city co-signing a construction contract — one that county representatives said they’d been waiting for city officials to sign since April.

Flechet said he was excited to see the project move one step closer to completion. When the music venue is finished — and when it’s safe for people to attend concerts — people in the Banks area expect it to deliver a new shot of energy and commerce to their neighborhood.

“We just don’t know how long it’s going to take before we can see people come to the music venue because of COVID,” Flechet said. “But in the long run, it’s a great thing, and the sooner it gets built, the better.”

The indoor portion of the venue will be completed by December. Officials hope to complete the outdoor portion by May 2021, just in time for concert season.

When Labor Day comes to a close, thousands of people in Indiana and Kentucky will lose the financial safety nets created to help them survive the COVID-19 pandemic.

The blow is threefold: Gig workers no longer qualify for unemployment insurance. People who are unemployed can no longer receive an extra $300 in benefits. And the amount of time a person can receive unemployment benefits reverts to 26 weeks.

Sarah Hess, a festival performer who struggled to get the unemployment payments she was owed after festival season was effectively canceled, said she’s worried again about gig workers like herself.

“It’s going to put a real strain on families that are part of the gigging industry,” Hess said. “It could lead to instability with their homes, it can lead to instability with getting their bills taken care of, food on the table.”

But University of Cincinnati economist Michael Jones said he can understand the argument that the time is right to remove certain pandemic support structures.

“In the peak of the crisis, there were five workers that were looking for every one job,” he said.

Now, there are 10 million available jobs to 8 million unemployed workers nationwide.

Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine withdrew his state from the federal government’s extra pandemic unemployment protections in June, yielding to business owners’ arguments that the payments were preventing people from finding jobs.

“There are several reasons people are not going back to work,” Jones said.

They include rising COVID-19 cases and the struggle to find childcare, among others. While the benefits go, Sarah Hess said she’s not sure the recovery of the American economy will last much longer.

“We are a little worried about another shutdown, so I’m trying to get as many jobs and gigs as I can now,” she said.

LAWRENCEBURG, Ind. — High winds and battering rain tore part of the the roof off Willie’s Sports Cafe on Friday night.

Water poured inside instantly, workers said. TVs, tabletops and the tops of customers’ heads caught it.

RELATED: Duke Energy reports more than 27,000 outages

Patrons moved downstairs and employees patched the roof quickly but anticipated more problems within a few hours. Forecasts called for more rain.

"Right when this happened, a tornado warning went off in this area," said Steve Van Wassenhove, owner of Willie's Sports Cafe. "There was a little bit of panic, some of our customers and all that. We have a full basement to get everybody downstairs and take care of everybody. Everything was handled very well from the staff."

Dearborn County emergency management workers said no reports of structural damage had reached them by 11 p.m. Friday, but state and county agencies were clearing downed trees and power lines from many roads.

Thousands of people in the Tri-State continue to wait for unemployment benefits, even as state systems have paid out tens of billions of dollars in unemployment benefits since the start of the pandemic.

In "The Rebound: Lost in the System," WCPO takes a closer look at where unemployment systems fall short, how many people are impacted and where they can find help.

First, Anchor Julie O'Neill dives into how states are reassessing their unemployment systems and how people have been left waiting for answers.

Evan Millward and Brian Niesz break down Cincinnati unemployment data, which show unemployment was worse during the pandemic than during the Great Recession. The good news: The Tri-State's unemployment situation is improving rapidly as the pandemic eases.

Courtney Francisco explores the causes behind the Tri-State's unemployment backlog, how systems deal with fraud, and what officials have done to get help to those who need it.

With the restaurant industry facing an employee shortage, Brian Mains reports how Freestore Foodbank and CityLink are ramping up culinary programs to bolster the local workforce.

Experts say there is a definite correlation between pandemic unemployment and mental illnesses like depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress. Lisa Smith reports on Greater Cincinnati Behavioral Health Services, which has specific programs to connect people living with mental illness with employment.

Many job seekers are now realizing they haven't done an in-person job interview after well over a year dominated by remote work and Zoom interviews. John Matarese has tips to help job seekers excel at their next interview.

Watch "The Rebound: Lost in the System" on WCPO 9 News and on your favorite streaming device Thursday.

Black-owned businesses have a $1.4 billion economic impact on the Cincinnati economy every year, according to a new study released by the University of Cincinnati and the African American Chamber of Commerce. But it’s hard to say if that number is high, low or average compared to the country’s other metropolitan areas — Cincinnati is the first one to measure it.

Eric Kearney, who runs the Greater Cincinnati African American Chamber of Commerce, wanted an exact number to guide his organization’s investing and advocacy into the future.

“There's a lot of talk about, ‘Oh, let’s help Black businesses,’” he said Friday. “‘’Oh, let’s throw some money at this, let’s do this,’ and there was no statistics, no data behind it. Now we have that data; we can use that data to make informed decisions.

“We can use that data as a benchmark. ‘So we're here, we want to grow to here.' How do we do it? How much money should we spend? What type of resources do we have to put behind it?”

RELATED: Why Cincinnati business leaders are working to attract more minority entrepreneurs to the Tri-State

He partnered with UC’s economics center to get it done, and UC spent 10 months conducting its study based on 2019 taxes.

The study found Black-owned businesses in the Cincinnati area — which includes the city, its suburbs and parts of neighboring states — employ 8,680 people, earn a combined $540 million and generate $6.2 million in sales tax every year.

The most-represented industries include professional, scientific and technical services; construction; health care; and retail.

It’s useful information for Kearney, he said. It would be more useful if other cities did the same thing so they could compare notes in the future.

“I cannot say, ‘How are we compared to Charlotte? How are we compared to Baltimore? How are we compared to Phoenix?’ because we are the first ones in the country to do it,” he said.

This story was reported in partnership with The Herald.