Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp bans cities and counties from ordering people to wear masks in public places, voiding orders taken by at least 15 local governments across the state on Wednesday.
A growing number of states have ordered residents to wear masks in public as new COVID-19 cases increase. One of the largest retail chains in the country, Walmart, also requires customers to use facial coatings.
Kemp, a Republican, instead, has been trying to encourage the voluntary use of masks, including telling college football fans that reducing infections from wearing masks would make the season possible.
Kemp’s move is likely to enrage local officials in the communities that had acted, including Atlanta, Augusta, Savannah, Rome and the hometown of the Athens-Clarke County Governor. Overall, local mask orders in Georgia were applied to 1.4 million of the state’s more than 10 million residents.
Kemp has maintained that local jurisdictions do not have the authority to order residents to wear masks. Savannah Mayor Van Johnson was the first local official to challenge Kemp and order masks for his city, and had said that police would start writing $ 500 citations to companies that did not enforce the law.
“It is officially official. Governor Kemp doesn’t care about us, ”Johnson wrote on Twitter Wednesday night. “Each man and woman for himself. Ignore the science and survive as best you can. “
Kemp’s new order also prohibits local governments from requiring masks on public property, such as city and county buildings. Some jurisdictions had issued such rules.
Kemp was one of the first governors to ease the previous restrictions, and although infections decreased for weeks afterward, they began to increase in June. Wednesday’s figures showed nearly 2,800 people hospitalized statewide with COVID-19 respiratory disease, the highest on record and a number that has nearly doubled since the beginning of the month.
The state reports that 84% of critical beds available in hospitals are in use, although some hospitals say they have opened more space and have more space.
Georgia overall had nearly 128,000 confirmed infections and nearly 3,100 deaths overall as of Wednesday, although experts say many more people get the disease but are never tested.
Local officials and Democrats had argued that cities and counties had the power to move forward because Kemp had not specifically prohibited orders to wear masks. His orders prohibited local governments from enacting coronavirus restrictions beyond their own directives, and called local mask mandates “legally unenforceable.”
“It is becoming clearer from medical and scientific data that the transmission of COVID-19 by droplets and aerosols is a huge community risk, so I made the decision to supplement the governor’s order with a local mask requirement for provide greater community safety, “said Kelly Girtz. , mayor of the Athens-Clarke County Unified Government, said in an email.
The changes come as increasing hospitalizations cause the state to search for new hospital beds to handle the record number of people admitted with the virus. The Kemp administration on Tuesday signed an agreement with Piedmont Healthcare, one of the four major hospital systems in the Atlanta area, to open 62 beds in a new tower at the Atlanta system’s main hospital.
The governor had previously announced plans to reopen an overflowing hospital at the gigantic Georgia World Congress Center in downtown Atlanta.
The trend of deaths had reached a minimum in Georgia on July 9, when the state averaged just 12 recently reported deaths per day in the previous week. But the trend has been on the rise, following an increase in cases and hospitalizations that started in early June. Georgia has averaged 24 deaths in the past week, the highest level in nearly four weeks.
Kemp on Wednesday extended parts of his executive orders governing the state’s response to the pandemic until July 31. It extends the ban on gatherings of more than 50 people, renews the rules on how businesses can operate, and instructs nursing home residents, nursing home residents, and others with medical conditions to shelter-in-place. The general state of emergency will last at least until August 11.
Kemp said Wednesday that the federal government has shipped 32,600 vials of the drug remdesivir, which has been shown to help people with infections. Kemp said that was enough to treat up to 5,400 patients. The governor said that from now on, hospitals will generally be able to buy the drug directly, although smaller federal shipments to Georgia will continue.
