Georgia Governor Brian Kemp is explicitly banning Georgia cities and counties from ordering people to wear masks in public places. On Wednesday, he reversed orders that at least 15 local governments across the state had adopted despite Kemp previously saying that cities and counties had no power to order masks during the coronavirus pandemic.
An increasing number of other states mandate residents to wear masks in public, including Alabama, which announced such a ban on Wednesday.
Instead, the Republican governor has been trying to encourage voluntary mask wear, including telling fans that reducing mask-borne infections would make the college football 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, mask orders for Wednesday covered 1.4 million of Georgia’s more than 10 million residents.
Savannah Mayor Van Johnson was the first local official to challenge Kemp and order masks, and had said police would begin writing $ 500 citations to non-law enforcement companies.
“It is officially official. Governor Kemp doesn’t care about us,” Johnson wrote on Twitter Wednesday night. “Every 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, overriding the requirements that some governments have imposed for citizens to wear masks inside city and county buildings.
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 hospital beds available 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. For most people, the new coronavirus causes mild or moderate symptoms. Most recover, but some can become seriously ill or die.
Local officials and Democrats had argued that cities and counties had the power to move forward because Kemp had not specifically prohibited mask orders. His orders prohibited local governments from enacting coronavirus restrictions beyond their orders and called the local mask mandates “legally unenforceable.”
“It is becoming clearer from medical and scientific data that COVID-19 transmission 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 to provide greater community security, “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 system’s main hospital in Atlanta. The state is providing nurses to tend the beds under a contract with a private staffing company. A Kemp spokesman on Wednesday could not immediately say how much the state was paying Piedmont or how long the deal would last.
The Republican governor previously announced plans to reopen an overflowing hospital at the gigantic Georgia World Congress Center in downtown Atlanta.
The growing number of COVID-19 cases led Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms to order the city to back off his plan to reopen and return to Phase 1 last week. “Georgia recklessly reopened and the people of our city and state are suffering the consequences,” Bottoms said.
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. Recently reported deaths sometimes occur weeks earlier. But the trend of deaths since then has been on the rise, following upward trends 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.
Other governments are taking action on their own property. Macon-Bibb County closed park pavilions, sports fields, basketball courts, and playgrounds on Tuesday to reduce transmission of the virus.
Kemp said Wednesday that the federal government has shipped 32,600 vials of the antiviral 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.
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