Ohio governor Mike DeWine tests positive for coronavirus (UPDATE: false positive)

Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/08/06/ohio-governor-mike-dewine-test.html

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“‘As part of the standard protocol to greet President Trump on the tarmac in Cleveland, I took a COVID test,’ DeWine wrote…”

If Trump would just stop traveling we wouldn’t have so many cases.

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Maybe they should change the name of the pandemic to KARMA-19.

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That frail old man looks like a goner.

Maybe Dr. Acton could have encouraged him to stay safe rather than listening to the people who called for rapid reopening of the state. Too bad we chased her out.

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It’s not poetic justice, really. In fact, two weeks ago, he made masks mandatory across the state (previously, just in the hardest hit counties), shut down the fairs (for everything except 4H/FFA activities, and that’s limited to just the families of participants), and now requires masks for all K-12 students.

He’s not been a “typical” republican when it comes to handling COVID. The main reason he dithered so long on making it mandatory was because he was investigating the legal authority of his office to mandate as such, and realistically, personality wise, he manifests about as much authority as a glass of Metamucil.

Of course, he’s not innocent of all blame as well. Not only did his family-owned minor league baseball team get a PPP loan, but also after Acton stepped down as Health Director, he created a new advisor position for her amid a state-wide government hiring freeze, to name a few.

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She’s officially out as of today. Details here, despite the misleading headline (they never answer the question):

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Feels pretty poetic to me. He did almost nothing to help the prisons, except let people like Tom Noe out, while keeping the prisons stuffed, resulting in what was for a while the single largest outbreak of Covid. He still forced people back to work and set up a snitch line for bosses.

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We can all be grateful that it was only a politician and not somebody useful like a garbage collector.

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Actual question: which governors HAVE helped prison populations? I see a lot of reporting on governors who aren’t doing much, but not a lot of reporting on those that are.

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None did great, but California let 8,000 state prisoners go, Ohio let 300 go. Two state prisons in Ohio had positive testing rates over 70%. In April about a quarter of all positive cases in Ohio were in the state prison system. Ohio had one of the smallest declines in prison and jail population and one of the highest numbers of deaths. Prison Populations Drop, But Not Because of COVID-19 Releases | The Marshall Project A State-By-State Look at 15 Months of Coronavirus in Prisons | The Marshall Project

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What that article doesn’t mention is that “small group of protesters” was armed and threatening her.

I am grateful for her service to the state, the lives that she saved, and I am sickened that they didn’t protect her and her family better. Somehow with all the police violence against unarmed, nonviolent, peaceful protesters, they weren’t able to do anything about the paramilitary lynch mob at her house…

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DeWine was retested twice this evening–and tested negative.

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He’s got my thoughts and prayers. Not he’d like mine, but he has them.

IIRC, he was pretty okay initially then went classic Republican and started reopening too soon.
Nothing in fighting Covid took special intelligence or knowledge, just the will to do what’s needed.
For sure, DeWine was pretty good for a Republican – still short of minimum necessary competence – but he has his share of blood on his hands.
Caveat: If I’m wrong on that reopening thing, apologies for the error (which would be proof I’m neither a conservative, Republican or a good person because they never apologize for their errors).

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Yep. Ohio flattened the curve, then business owners, labor leaders, and other wealthy Republicans pressured him to reopen and “save the economy” in July. Cue the spikes.

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They did send out State Troopers, and she thanked them in her goodbye speech.

Choking off remedial measures prematurely is GOP heritage, starting with eding Reconstruction. See, too what they did to the New Deal. With a domestic enemy like the GOP, who needs to worry about foreign threats? None can compare.

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