As Georgia’s statewide shelter-in-place order is lifted Friday, Gov. Brian Kemp is standing by his decision to do so. He argued in an interview with WABE that maintaining the lockdown for several more months would not be effective.
“I mean, people are not going to do that, No. 1. No. 2, many people are going to lose their home, or the dwelling that they’re renting, and they won’t have anywhere to shelter in place,” he said. “So for all those people that are saying all those things, they’re also not dealing with the reality of what working Georgians are having to deal with.”
Kemp said that people have been moving around in some capacity during the shelter-in-place regardless.
“I mean, even for people that weren’t going into the office every day, many of them were going to the grocery stores, many of them were going to pharmacies,” he said. “So there’s been community spread. The virus is with us; we’re never going to stop that from happening.”
‘Drastic Budget Effect’
Kemp said another reason to begin trying to safely reopen the economy is to mitigate what will be a “drastic budget effect,” pointing to the more than a million Georgians who are now unemployed in the state.
“It’s going to flow down to the local level,” Kemp said of the state’s finances. “So we’re going to have to make some very difficult choices in our state. Which is another reason that we’ve got to figure out a way to restart our economy in a safe way.”
“There’s going to be a new norm when we do that. You know, people are going to have to get used to wearing a mask in public,” he said. “We’re going to have to have some of these orders that we have in place now for businesses to be able to open.”
Kemp said Georgians should get used to wearing masks for the foreseeable future, “until we know more” from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and medical experts.
While state agencies have been asked to cut 14% of their budgets for the fiscal year beginning this summer by legislative leaders and the governor’s budget office, Kemp said the financial picture still isn’t clear.
“Right now, we know very little about the budget. I think the legislative leaders and discussion with our office are doing the best we can, with the quite draconian data that we have right now, which is not much,” he said. “We’re still trying to see what our revenue is going to be for this month. We’ll be watching that very closely.”
Local Control
The governor’s current executive order — which extends a shelter-in-place restriction for vulnerable populations including the elderly, those with moderate to severe asthma and chronic lung and kidney disease patients through June 12 — supersedes all local government decisions.
Kemp said he decided to switch to that approach after early on in the pandemic response, local governments were “complaining that because of actions that some of their neighbors had taken, it was causing an ill effect on them, if you will, pushing people out to their communities. So it became apparent to me in a pandemic, in a public health emergency that we needed to take a more statewide approach, which I have done.”
He pointed out he still has the ability to make actions on a local level and said he has offered that option to some localities, which they have declined.
“If we see a need to do that in the future, that’s certainly an option that I’m willing to take and work with the locals to do that,” he said.
Kemp said there hasn’t been a need to take further action in Atlanta specifically and that he spoke with Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms about the situation a few days ago.
“Really, we don’t have a need to have any kind of special order for Atlanta right now. What we need people to do is to show up and get testing,” he said. “We’ve been setting testing sites up around the metro Atlanta area in the last couple of days. And nobody’s been showing up to get tested.”
Bottoms has repeatedly urged Atlantans to stay home, despite the lifting of the statewide shelter-in-place order.
“To the extent we’ve had any relief in this state, it’s because in Atlanta and other metropolitan areas, we have been very aggressive about closing businesses, putting in stay-at-home orders, but we are not out of the woods,” she told CNN last week.
“Nothing has changed. People are still getting infected. People are still dying. We don’t have a cure to this virus. The only thing that’s helped us is that we’ve stayed apart from one other, and I’m simply telling people to continue to do that.”
‘Learn To Live With It And Deal With It’
To those Georgians who are afraid of leaving their homes, still not willing to open their businesses despite the financial risk for fear of the risk to their lives, Kemp thanked them for heeding the restrictions and helping flatten the curve. He emphasized he’s only offering the “opportunity” to open “in the safest way possible” by lifting the lockdown.
But he circled back to the need for the state’s economy to take a step toward normalcy.
“We’re not going to get rid of this virus until we have a vaccine or have some sort of cure. We’ve learned to live with it and deal with it,” he said. “And if people are smart and follow the guidelines and actions, I believe that people will learn to live with it; they’ll be able to safely open their business.
“And we can at least get some sort of our economy back because, I will tell you, the drastic economy we’re seeing now, there’ll be health outcomes to deal with in the future, from a lot of different scenarios. There’s more than just the coronavirus that I’m having to worry about and deal with as our future goes forward.”
