Ohio’s COVID-19 Mitigations Did Not Work

Data from Ohio COVID-19 site, https://coronavirus.ohio.gov/wps/portal/gov/covid-19/home

I have been recording Ohio’s COVID-19 statistics in a spreadsheet since mid-March. To my surprise, when I plotted the data in April, I got a bunch of straight lines. I was expecting an exponential curve as seen in places like New York City. When President Trump announced the federal rules for states to re-open, I was puzzled. The Ohio COVID-19 statistics were straight lines and not declining. According to federal rules for re-opening, Ohio had not met one of the basic rules. Ohio went ahead anyway. It is now almost 30 days after Ohio started re-opening. Those daily increases for Confirmed Cases, Hospitalizations, ICU, and deaths have not budged. The coefficient of determination for the trendlines, R2, is really good. With 109 days of data in the books, we can safely say that the lockdown, masks, and social distancing do not appear to have had much of an effect on the COVID-19 statistics in Ohio.