Experts Predict Sharp Rise In Georgia COVID-19 Deaths Following Eased Restrictions

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Diners outside a Mexican restaurant near Mercer University in Macon were separated by a brick pillar and a few feet Tuesday. / GPB

Now with Georgia in its first full week of relaxed coronavirus restrictions, data experts predict a sharp rise in deaths in the state.

The predictions mirror national models against which President Trump is pushing back.

The University of Washington Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation COVID-19 modeling now incorporates changes in social distancing. For Georgia that model imagines the state is currently only staying home half as much as it did during Governor Kemp’s Shelter in Place order.  

Accordingly, the IHME model pushes Georgia’s projected total deaths to around 5,000 people by August 4. So far 1,272 people have been killed by COVID-19 in the state. About 1.9% of Georgia’s 10.6 million residents have been tested.  

A model from Georgia Tech and the Harvard Medical School looks further into time and is less optimistic.   

The COVID-19 Simulator projects that under current government restrictions, Georgia could see almost 30,000 COVID-19 deaths by August 31 after a meteoric rise in cases in late summer. However, the model also suggests that a return to shelter in place restrictions now could limit deaths in the state to around 2,300.

Public health experts and politicians alike have always contended cases and deaths will continue as lockdowns ease up, but continue to disagree about the probable scale of the increases or how to govern best under relaxed restrictions.  

In Albany, Mayor Bo Dorough told residents in a Tuesday press conference he was obligated to enforce relaxed rules on restaurants handed down from the state, this even though the city formerly registered displeasure with those rules in a formal resolution over a week ago.  

“A gentleman from a state agency was in this meeting with local restaurant owners last Thursday,” Dorough said. “And he acknowledged that the guideline of 10 people for every 500 square feet is just not workable. It’s not realistic.”

So Dorough concluded with another plea for residents to double down on social distancing and using masks in public.

In an interview with GPB News on Friday, Gov. Brian Kemp applauded the work of local officials in southwest Georgia.

“They're doing great and they have flattened the curve,” he said. “The hospital numbers are looking awesome down there, we just want to keep driving those numbers down and not have another flare up in any part of that area.”

Kemp also said that he was in constant communication with local officials across the state, and if there are other hotspots that develop as larger restrictions have been rolled back, he would not hesitate to enact targeted orders to combat the virus.

"I certainly have that arrow in my quiver,” he said.

The Trump administration on Monday pushed back against an internal government report, obtained by The New York Times, that predicts the daily coronavirus death toll could nearly double nationally by early June.

The Times story cites an internal CDC update, acquired from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, that predicts the number of deaths per day from COVID-19 will reach about 3,000 by June 1.

More than 68,000 people in the United States have already died from the coronavirus pandemic, summarily eclipsing an earlier estimate of a total U.S. death toll of 60,000 lives lost from the virus.

"This is not a White House document nor has it been presented to the coronavirus task force or gone through interagency vetting," White House spokesman Judd Deere said in a statement.

The internal document obtained by the Times also suggests that by the end of the month, the country would likely experience 200,000 new cases a day, up from a current rate of about 25,000 a day.

"This data is not reflective of any of the modeling done by the task force or data that the task force has analyzed. The president's phased guidelines to open up America again are a scientific driven approach that the top health and infectious disease experts in the federal government agreed with. The health of the American people remains President Trump's top priority and that will continue as we monitor the efforts by states to ease restrictions," Deere said.

Justin Lessler, an associate professor of epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, who reportedly created the model reported by the Times, told The Washington Post that the work contained a wide range of possibilities and modeling was not complete.

 The grim forecasts come after several states last week took steps to reopen their economies, despite some not meeting White House recommendations outlined to ease social distancing measures.

Trump himself this weekend said that the death toll could likely top 100,000, calling it a "horrible thing."