During a press conference with multiple children's hospital doctors, DeWine along with the doctors all noted that hospitalizations in school-aged children are increasing greatly to the point where some hospitals such as Dayton Children's Hospital are experiencing "red bed status" causing many children to leave the hospital without being seen due to overflow. 

Additionally, these doctors called for all school-aged children to get vaccinated if they are eligible to do so.

With this in mind, many children's hospitals are asking DeWine to order a statewide mask mandate for all K-12 schools. However, DeWine responded to this by saying that while he'd love to do that, it would quickly be overturned by the State Legislature. 

"The legislature has made very clear that if we put on a mandate for kids in school to wear masks they would take it off. And people say, 'well, Mike, why don't you do that? You could be on for a couple days,' but the problem with that is, if that happens, we would cause a lot of confusion and we might go backwards," DeWine said. 

DeWine says his hope now is that since a statewide mandate would be overturned, superintendents would hear the data presented at Tuesday's press conference and be compelled to order a mask mandate for their school.

"I'm counting frankly on the good will of our school boards, the good will of the people of the State of Ohio when they hear the facts, the facts have been laid out very, very clearly by our children's hospitals. I hope when the people of the state hear those facts from the children's hospital that we're going to see more and more of our schools doing what is clearly necessary, and that is having masking in our schools," DeWine said.

DeWine says he believes the most powerful voice to get schools to implement vaccine mandates are children's hospitals and he hopes for more schools to implement these mandates in the coming days.

"If we can't get it done one way, let's get it done another way," DeWine said.