Governor Brian Kemp says Georgia isn’t out of the woods when it comes to the COVID-19 pandemic as new cases and hospitalizations continue to rise.
He kicked off a two-day flyaround tour of the state Wednesday morning to encourage people to wear face masks and follow other public health practices in advance of the 4th of July holiday weekend.
“We were moving in a very positive direction. Summer hit, people were itching to get out after weeks and months of shutdown,” Kemp told reporters from a hanger at DeKalb-Peachtree Airport. “Quite honestly, folks got lackadaisical a little bit. We’re all guilty of that.”
The state has seen a steady increase of new coronavirus infections in the weeks since Kemp started lifting shelter-in-place restrictions in late April. In the last week, some days have seen record numbers of new COVID-19 cases reported.
The number of people getting severely ill from the disease is also increasing. Single-day counts of hospitalizations from the Georgia Emergency Management Agency are where they were in early May.
“There’s no doubt our hospitalizations have increased,” Kemp said. “Thankfully, they’re not going up exponentially. It’s worrisome, but not alarming at this point, and we don’t want it to get alarming.”
Kemp encouraged Georgians to take measures such as wearing face masks in public when they can’t stay far enough away from others, say at a busy beach or a crowded backyard barbecue.
But the governor said again that he thinks a statewide face mask mandate isn’t needed.
“We shouldn’t need a mask mandate for people to do the right thing,” he said.
Kemp also declined to comment on the move by the city of Savannah to institute its own mask mandate, which seems to violate his own executive orders that prevent localities from making their own public health rules.
He says his office has yet to review Savannah’s order.
“We can disagree on how we go about solving a problem, but I think that we all agree it’s wise for people to wear a mask especially when they’re out in a public setting and they can’t socially distance themselves,” Kemp said.
Accompanying the governor on his statewide tour is Dr. Kathleen Toomey, who leads the Georgia Department of Public Health. Along with encouraging people to wear face masks, she reiterated a call for Georgians to participate in contact tracing.
She says her agency’s efforts to track people exposed to COVID-19 isn’t receiving as much support as she’d hoped, even though participation isn’t just a suggestion.
“Technically it is legally required,” Toomey said. “You don’t want to use that kind of coercion to get people to work with the health department, whether it’s COVID or whether it’s measles.”
More Than 150 UGA Students And Employees Test Positive
On Tuesday the University of Georgia said they were aware of 154 positive cases of COVID-19 among students and staff.
They did not specify which campuses were affected or the number of students who had tested positive.
“The University has been in remote operations since mid-March, and many of the cases included in the count are from the hometowns of students or employees who have not been on campus since that time,” the UGA system said on its page tracking cases.
