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As Some States Look To Reopen Their Economies, Georgia Not Yet Ready
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While states like New York and California are drafting plans to lift stay-home restrictions and bring their economies back to life, the worst of COVID-19's impact on Georgia is still weeks away.
Both of Georgia’s U.S. senators are on President Trump’s bipartisan, bicameral Congressional Taskforce to Reopen America, and Gov. Brian Kemp tasked about 20 business and government leaders to helm an economic impact committee for the state.
While touring a 200-bed overflow hospital constructed in the sprawling Georgia World Congress Center Thursday, Kemp said it is time to start discussing next steps for the state, but there is not a one-size-fits-all approach.
“The situation we have in Georgia is our peak of when it gets here keeps moving further away,” Kemp said. “And we have other states like New York, Washington and California that are now on the backside of the peak … so the governors are going to have to make decisions based on what’s happening in the state.”
President Trump, after meeting with lawmakers and state leaders, is set to hold a briefing Thursday evening to give guidelines for how governors should proceed in reintroducing people back into public life.
WATCH LIVE: White House To Share Coronavirus Guidelines On A Path To Reopening The Country
Kemp said he’s been in conversations with Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan, House Speaker David Ralston (R-Blue Ridge) members of the Coronavirus Task Force and medical professionals to constantly assess how Georgia is responding to the public health emergency.
Projections from the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation now push back the peak of Georgia’s COVID-19 cases and hospital use to the first week of May, while the state’s stay-home order currently expires April 30.
The governor said that the next week of data is going to help determine whether that order will be extended and what steps the state will take next.
“To me, I wish the peak was now and we’d be moving on the other side, so when it moves out it’s a little disappointing,” Kemp said. “But on the other hand, every time the model moves further out, the numbers get better for our bed capacity.”
The 200-bed space in the Atlanta convention hall is one of many surge capacity units provided across the state to bolster medical resources in anticipation of a rise in ill patients.
In Macon, 24 beds are coming by way of six pods of prefabricated buildings in the parking lot next to the Medical Center at Navicent Health.
Hospitals in Rome, Gainesville and Albany are getting reinforcements too, with both medical resources and staffing.
For now, most hospital systems are below capacity, save the hardest-hit areas around Albany in southwest Georgia.
In the latest press release from Phoebe Putney Health System, CEO Scott Steiner said news of COVID-19 cases plateauing comes in the same breath as a record nine deaths reported in one day.
“That fact alone should be a wakeup call to anyone who thinks he or she is safe from this virus,” he said. ”COVID-19 is a vicious illness that continues to claim lives in our community, and we must all take the threat seriously.”
The toll of the virus is not limited to the health of Georgians, although 587 have lost their lives since the beginning of the pandemic.
The latest report from the Georgia Department of Labor shows at least 10% of Georgia’s population has filed for unemployment in the last month and over half a billion dollars in benefits paid out.
In an interview with CNHI, Commissioner Mark Butler said his agency is scrambling to keep up with a system not designed to withstand this kind of demand.
“Across the state, residents struggling to file for unemployment benefits have reported dropped calls and web pages that won’t load.
But if the department added 1,000 more phone lines and tripled its staff, he said, it still wouldn’t be enough.”
These are the things that Kemp must grapple with.
“We're talking to small business people every day, and they are begging to go back to work,” he said. “And I understand that, but also have had a situation where we're having to send patients from Albany to Atlanta to get a hospital bed. And we don't need two or three of those scenarios in different cities around the state.”
Meanwhile, the state will continue to build hospital capacity and work to expand access to testing, The governor has called Georgia’s testing situation “unacceptable” but also said Thursday that the government is not the answer.
“We can definitely do more than we do and we can definitely help, but we need the private sector to step up,” he said. “We need to have a test where people can basically immediately test themselves before they leave the house to go to work.”
Still, Kemp said, it is possible to start moving towards a reopening, but life will not immediately return to normal.
“You can't just take it from off and completely turn it back on,” he said. “People are going to have to continue to socially distance. They're going to have to be comfortable with wearing a mask when there's a lot of people or if they're going to the grocery store and public places…”
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