WOOSTER Mitch Sleek expected funeral home workers to be placed in phase 1A of Ohio’s vaccine rollout. The worst-case scenario would be waiting for phase 1B. Neither happened.
“Now, they kind of have us in no man’s land,” said Sleek, the funeral director for McIntire, Bradham, and Sleek Funeral Home.
Ohio’s funeral directors are pleading with Gov. Mike DeWine to immediately include them and their employees in phase 1B due to their daily exposure to COVID-19 at nursing homes, hospitals, and families whose loved ones died of the virus.
“Common sense,” Mark Auble, funeral director of Auble Funeral Homes in Orrville, said of why his profession should be getting vaccinated now. “We’re around crowds of people. We’re around family members. It doesn’t take long to put one and two and three together.”