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Well, more than a million vaccinated Ohioans have registered for the chance to win a million dollars.

We'll look into the impact of the shot lottery so far, and we check in with an expert who helped develop the model of the state first presented on how covid would hit Ohio about what he sees going forward.

All this weekend, the state of Ohio.

Welcome to the state of Ohio, I'm Karen Kasler by this time next week, the state will have announced its first vacc, a millionaire, the person who will win the first prize in the covid-19 Qaderi, the governor, Mike DeWine, announced in a statewide address earlier this month, more than 43 percent of all Ohioans, over five million people have gotten their first shots, with over 38 percent who have completed the process.

Those numbers have dropped before twines shattering announcement but increased by almost the same amount after it 12 to 17 year olds became eligible in that time period.

But Ohio Health Director Stephanie McCleod said vaccinations among 30 to 54 year olds did as well.

So will a lottery incentivize people who are on the fence about the covid-19 vaccine?

State House correspondent Andy Chow talked to experts in the field of economics and psychology about how lotteries impact social behavior.

The announcement of a one million dollar lottery in Ohio sparked national and worldwide buzz rolling up their sleeves there.

The state is hoping the allure of a one million dollar cash prize is enough to get unvaccinated Ohioans to go out and get the covid-19 shot.

But will it work?

Jake Corrigan, a professor of economics at Kenyon College, ran a study on how much money a student would want to get paid in order to get the flu shot last year.

What they found is that cash incentives can work.

So these were not the students who were most eager to get vaccinated.

Still, we found that ninety five percent of them would get the shot in exchange for 100 dollars or less, and that three quarters would get the shot in exchange for ten dollars or less.

So that tells us that cash incentives, even relatively modest ones, can have a big impact on vaccination rates.

But Ohio isn't handing out money.

It's running a lottery sweepstakes, which Kevin Bennett says can make a difference.

Bennett, a teaching professor of psychology at the Penn State University Beever campus, has studied the social science and human behavior behind lotteries and found there's a certain allure that draws people into playing a game with the odds stacked against them.

We're attracted to them because we tend to overestimate small percentages.

Therefore, we like the idea of a small chance at winning a very large number a million dollars or more.

We actually prefer that over a small reward that is just guaranteed.

So there's something about taking that risk and there's this illusion of control that some people have playing lottery.

If they pick their own numbers, they feel like they have a better chance.

There's the availability heuristic, which basically says that when we see people around us who are winning the lottery, we we overestimate the chance that we can win.

Since Gov.

Mike DeWine announced the Ohio vaccin million sweepstakes.

There has been a notable bump in the state's vaccination rate.

However, that increase is also reflecting the state, broadening eligibility for ages 12 to 17.

Eileen Anderson PHY is an associate professor of bioethics at Case Western Reserve School of Medicine who studies the Ethics and Decision-Making behind public health scenarios.

She says encouraging behavior that can benefit population health is a constant battle because people can fall into several categories for why they will or will not get vaccinated.

That's why, according to Anderson, why it's important for officials to come up with a variety of ways to encourage people to get the vaccine.

From a public health perspective, if we want to get a population vaccinated, we need to use kind of every single tool in the arsenal to do it.

So money and the chance of gaining some money or in the case of younger Ohioans, education, paid education, you know, that's it.

It makes sense to bring that to the table.

And we know from the regular lottery and from lots of other types of information that people love that kind of intermittent reward where we might just win.

You know, probably we won't.

But it might be me.

Along with the fantasy of winning a million dollars, Anderson PHY says there's an added social element where people talk about the lottery and might want to get in on it if their friends and family are already taking part.

It's worth noting that the more people who get vaccinated and enter the drawing, the more the odds against winning go up.

There was a consensus among the psychology and human behavior experts that the lottery does have the potential to drive up numbers among certain people who are not already swayed by public service announcements or other.

Disability programs, I would love to think that this is going to take a lot of people who were on the fence who perhaps weren't hardcore vaccine skeptics but just hadn't gotten around to get vaccinated yet.

And this is going to give them the motivation that they need to actually go out and get vaccinated.

However, there are other studies that suggest attaching a monetary value for health benefit, like a vaccine, can have a long term consequence of undermining the importance of that benefit.

The state will hand out a total of five million dollars after five weekly drawings.

In addition to the five full ride college scholarships, the Ohio Department of Health has already spent twenty three million dollars on vaccine administration costs, with ten point five dollars million of that going towards public outreach and education.

That money comes from federal coronavirus relief funds already appropriated to the health department by a panel of legislators Andy Chow Statehouse News Bureau.

Speaking of money and the pandemic, the state of Ohio overpaid more than two billion dollars in unemployment benefits to hundreds of thousands of Ohioans during the pandemic of the two point one billion dollars in overpayments by the state, which includes state money, federal money and the weekly federal checks of it for six hundred dollars and then three hundred twenty one million went to fraudulent payments for traditional unemployment and four hundred fifty seven million dollars was non fraudulent payments for traditional unemployment in the federally paid Pandemic Unemployment Assistance Program for independent contractors, gig workers and others who don't qualify for traditional unemployment.

Four hundred and forty one million dollars went to fraudulent claims and one point two billion dollars went to non fraudulent claims.

The Ohio Department of Job and Family Services is working on coming up with waivers for at least some of those who receive the one point six billion dollars in non fraudulent overpayments in both programs.

So they might not have to pay that money back.

In the last year, more than five hundred eighty seven thousand Americans have died of covid-19, including over nineteen thousand Ohioans.

There have been more than thirty three million confirmed and probable cases in the United States, including more than a million in Ohio.

More than 58000 Ohioans have been hospitalized and over eight thousand of those were in intensive care a year ago.

Those numbers were inconceivable to many people, but not to infectious disease experts with modeling what might be ahead.

On April 17th of last year, I talked with the head of Ohio State University's Infectious Diseases Institute, which developed some of those models that the state was using for shutdowns.

I talked with Michael Oglesby again this week about where we are now.

We predicted the initial surge quite accurately, the peak that occurred in mid-April and twenty 20.

And I think the variable that was difficult to anticipate was, is is there a seasonality to this infection and what is the impact of human behavior?

So when we started to see that tweet that occurred in mid-July, once we saw the rise, the modeling certainly anticipated the duration of that peak and we really didn't know what to expect going into autumn and winter.

You know, I will say that once the cases really started rising exponentially in November, again, the modeling accurately predicted the magnitude and duration of that peak is just a function of nobody.

I don't think we fully anticipated the fact that there would be three and and even four peaks.

If you count this last peak in mid-April.

So, you know, looking back, I think we have a pretty good handle on this particular seasonality and the impact of behavior.

And so we're much more accurate moving forward.

I remember going back in time thinking about all the very scary deathtoll predictions, I mean, there were some models that were showing some really frightening numbers.

Do you think that those things affected people's behavior at all?

Because we did see some compliance and willingness to be all in this together for a little while, and then things really changed.

I don't think that the the rate of infection or the mortality had the impact on behavior that I would hope.

We were never asked me in spring of twenty twenty if we were going to be approaching six hundred thousand deaths in the United States, I would have said that the worst case scenario and we have thirty three million cases in the United States to date so far.

And again, I, I attribute much of this to our response.

There's a significant behavioral component to that, whether it's compliance with distancing mask wearing.

And now we're looking at vaccination coverage.

How do we come to this point where it seems like it's it's over so quickly?

I mean, I know it took a year to get here, but I remember CDC Director Rochelle Walensky holding back tears just at the end of March, saying that she wanted people to hold on just a little while longer on masks and social distancing just a few weeks later.

We are here now where the CDC is saying people who are vaccinated can toss their masks except in certain circumstances.

So is this CDC guidance?

Do you feel a way to incentivize people to get vaccinated or is it really based solely on the science that we know right now?

That's a fantastic question.

I mean, I am concerned about the pace with which to see has relaxed the mask mandates.

And I do believe that the change was designed to encourage vaccination because of the benefits of being vaccinated in terms of our preventive measures.

I think the challenges are can I assume that someone in public not wearing a mask is fully vaccinated, and does this change feed into a narrative that the pandemic is at an end?

And I'm happy to discuss that as well.

Where are we in the pandemic?

Because there's a fair amount that we can say about that.

Yeah, I want to ask you about that.

In your view, is the pandemic over?

Absolutely not.

The pandemic won't end in the United States until it ends globally, and so, as you know, there's been a massive surge in May worldwide.

It's peaking.

But but the numbers are just astronomical, particularly when you look at countries like India and South America.

And so we're not on an island.

The trajectory in the United States is encouraging, but we're not out of the woods.

As I mentioned, you know, we're seeing this seasonality to these peaks and infection.

And so if you think back to 20, 20, we saw a peak in late April and then the numbers really came down as they are doing so now, we have approximately the same infection rate now that we saw a year ago.

We we do not know what level of immunity in our population is required to block transmission.

The estimates are somewhere around 70 to 80 percent.

And so we know that forty three percent of Ohioans have started vaccination and maybe 20 percent have experienced a prior infection.

But that vaccine coverage is very uneven.

It's particularly low in some Ohio rural counties.

We don't know the duration of protection from vaccination or prior infection, and we do not know how effective the vaccines are against new viral variants that are more transmissible cause, more severe disease, and in some cases can actually a vaccine induced immunity.

And the experience that I'm speaking of, they're relatively new in our population.

They entered in January and now they're about 80 percent of what we're seeing circulating.

We know that the vaccines, for example, are protective in terms of preventing disease, but we don't know the degree to which vaccines prevent transmission.

And so I bring this up not to incite fear, but we must be clear on the point that we remain in the midst of a pandemic caused by a virus that that's new to us.

And so I am optimistic that we could have things under control by autumn.

But there are a number of things that have to happen.

And I was just going to ask, when you start talking about all the seasonality here and you consider that, yes, five million Ohioans have gotten their first dose, but that's still less than 40 percent of Ohioans who have gone through and gotten the full vaccination.

Are we headed for trouble because we're lifting restrictions to early or were people going to stop following them anyway?

Well, it is, yes and yes, you know, I.

When I say, can we get this under control by autumn, the things that need to happen is we need to to continue to aggressively pursue vaccination.

And that includes those who have previously been infected.

And we also know that there are clinical trials looking at the effectiveness of vaccine and school age children.

And we should be able to vaccinate school age children starting perhaps by the end of twenty, twenty one and two to directly address your question.

While not mandated, I would still strongly recommend that we don't abandon all measures that we know are effective at curbing the spread of infection, and that includes mask wearing in certain high risk settings.

And I just want to point out, I looked at a statistic the other day that looked at the number of documented influenza cases and they were reduced by over one hundred fold last year as a result of our preventive strategies.

And so we know that they're also effective against SARS coronavirus to transmit a very similar manner.

So what we really need to do is I agree that some degree of relaxation is appropriate, but we really have to emphasize the importance of vaccination and the importance of continuing to monitor infections.

Will we see a mid-July peak this year like we saw last year?

If we don't, I'll be much more optimistic.

And again, what's going to happen in late September as we move into October?

Will we see a rise like we saw last year or will that rise not occur?

And again, that'll be the indication that we're really looking at the beginning of the end.

When you talk about relaxation of certain restrictions, I mean, is it time to open up stadiums for full capacity for baseball games like the Cleveland Indians are planning on doing, is it time for concerts and live music events and festivals where large groups of people come in maybe from different parts of the state?

What about opening up offices and having workers come back to the office?

I mean, what is what is OK, what is acceptable in your view?

Well, I think these activities, we can transition back.

What I pack a football stadium with one hundred plus thousand people as we've done in the past.

I think that's a high risk move.

And.

We'll probably do the experiment in some settings, but, you know, the concern is.

The outcome of that experiment might be, hey, look, it wasn't a big deal, but it also that the result could be, oh, my gosh, you know, we just saw a pretty dramatic outbreak of infection caused by a new coronavirus variant.

So my feeling is, yeah, let's start easing back into these venues, but I would not go from zero to full capacity.

I just think that's that's a very high risk move.

And I know that, understandably, many of us are concerned about the economic impact of a reduced occupancy in some of these venues.

But there's a much higher economic cost.

Should we find ourselves back in the throes of another surge?

So I think it makes sense to to ease into this gradually and particularly over the course of summer.

And then I get back to this issue of as as we reopen some of these venues, are we going to see a mid-July peak?

And if not, we can continue continue the opening, if you will.

I know you've said it's really hard to predict where we're going in terms of whether this will be a seasonal thing or not, but do you think that people will be up for wearing masks again if there's an outbreak, if there are these outbreaks that close down places, are people going to how are people going to react to that?

What about booster vaccines would potentially have to start a whole campaign to get people there, booster shots, right.

Well, now we're talking the human behavioral component.

In my mind, it's it's easier to start gradually relaxing measures.

Versus completely removing a mandate, if you will, than it is to say, OK, no more mask if you're completely vaccinated, but oh, by the way, we might have to return.

I think that's a harder task.

In the latter scenario, I think compliance is better if we make the move gradually.

But again, getting back to your question about what was the motivation of a CDC's behind CDC recommendation, and I and I do believe it was likely an effort to encourage individuals to vaccinate.

And finally, how did you feel throughout this whole process when you saw the discussion moving away from science and becoming political into conspiracy theories?

I mean, you had the mask versus anti mass debate, the arguments over opening businesses, the conspiracy theories about the pandemic and vaccines.

As a scientist, were you surprised that that's where we ended up going during this pandemic?

Surprised is probably not the right word.

I was disappointed.

I feel like we're entering into an era where.

You know, we have all this information available on the Internet and we have all of these preprint, and I want to spend a moment on the preprint.

These were articles that were put together and often by individuals in the scientific community, but they had not yet been peer reviewed.

But there is a move to make them publicly available because perhaps there's information there that would be useful in real time.

And so what we found are some really faulty pieces of information that were out there that people grabbed and they viewed as legitimate.

And so you could find support for almost any position that you wanted to take.

And.

And to me, just served as a very real detriment to moving forward and to some degree, it eroded public confidence in science.

And now we seem to have entered into an era where science is used almost as an opinion on equal standing, as somebody else that has no background in epidemiology, virology, public health.

And so we have a lot of work to do.

I think we have a lot of work to do in science communication.

And I know as a scientist I'm focused on this a lot because I realize that through much of my career, you know, in speaking with fellow scientists, I didn't spend so much time thinking about how to most effectively communicate with a very broad audience that doesn't have that background.

And that's our that's our fault.

And unfortunately, I think.

This whole pandemic has been very politicized and and so there are emotional drivers behind taking a particular position.

And and so I also know that data doesn't convince people to change course.

We're social creatures.

We're emotionally driven.

And what we tend to do is follow the beliefs of our community.

And so really to to get the word out, to get people going in the right direction, we need to be working at the community level.

You know, maybe somebody is not going to listen to me, but maybe they'll listen to leadership in their church or other community leaders.

And actually, I had a very interesting meeting with a group of Episcopal Church leaders in Brandell on this very topic.

And I I was the message really was you people are the ones that can really help our societies turn the corner.

I know I've said this before, but I can't say it enough.

Pandemic's not over.

And so.

You know, things are looking great in the United States.

But we have to look at what's going on in the world around us, and a good analogy would be like saying, OK, maybe things are great in Ohio.

Can I ignore what's going on in Michigan, Indiana, Kentucky, West Virginia, Pennsylvania?

No, because we know that things can change in a heartbeat.

Fourteen months ago, the shutdowns and social distancing began with the state stay at home order that affected every person, every business, every student, every nursing home resident and their families and of course, every health care worker.

And as people absorb the impact, many were surprised at the depth of the loss felt with the end of opportunities for social interaction.

Some turn to remote platforms to try to keep those alive through virtual happy hours, Internet meet ups and online concerts and programs.

Community discussion forums, including the Columbus Metropolitan Club and the City Club of Cleveland, left their luncheon meeting rooms and went virtual for more than a year.

They're now starting to open back up.

My statehouse news bureau colleague Andy Chow moderated a CMC forum on passenger trains and transit this week in front of a group of people, but a smaller group than at the start of last year.

The City Club of Cleveland, which meets in a small space in downtown, has stayed mostly virtual for now.

But I'm told that that will be changing this summer.

And that's it for this week for my colleagues at the Statehouse News Bureau of Ohio Public Radio and Television.

Thanks for watching.

Please check out our website at statenews.org and you can follow us on the show on Facebook and Twitter.

And please join us again next time for the state of Ohio.

Support for the statewide broadcast of the state of Ohio comes from medical mutual, providing more than one point four million Ohioans peace of mind with a selection of health insurance plans online at Medd Mutual dotcom slash Ohio by the law offices of PorterWright Morris and Arthur LLP.

Now with eight locations across the country, PorterWright is a legal partner with a new perspective to the business community.

More at PorterWright Dotcom and from the Ohio Education Association, representing 100 24000 members who work to inspire their students to think creatively and experience the joy of learning online at O H E A dot org.