Gov. Brian Kemp said he’d be fine if Georgia schools closed their doors because of the coronavirus pandemic — or if they didn’t.
He urged people to take care of the elderly and the infirm — but, unlike governors in some other states, did not restrict visitations at most nursing homes.
He recommended that people avoid crowds — but didn’t ban large gatherings, as some other governors have.
And it wasn’t until late Friday that Kemp signaled he would declare a public health emergency, even as he obtained a special legislative appropriation earlier this week to handle just such an emergency.
Kemp’s handling of the coronavirus outbreak has been at once cautious and uneven, leaving many of the hardest decisions — about closing public schools and public events, among others — to local officials around the state.
At the same time, Kemp’s administration kept a tight hold on information concerning the coronavirus in Georgia, releasing fewer details about testing and patients than many other states have done.
On Thursday, Kemp said he was guided by data and science. He did not share details on either. He did, however, defend Georgia’s response.
“We’re not to the point where we’re mandating every single public school or asking our higher education institutions to close,” Kemp said. “We’ve heard those concerns at the local level. We’re freeing them up, if you will, for them to make those decisions. If we get to a point where we feel that escalates, and the public health officials are telling me that, then we’ll react.”
Kemp’s approach is sharply at odds with the swift and aggressive measures taken in other parts of the country. Public health emergencies have been declared in 37 states and the District of Columbia, giving governments broader powers to address the crisis. Just 10 states with confirmed coronavirus cases had not taken that action.
Kemp was preparing to make an emergency declaration Saturday. The Legislature is expected to convene Monday to approve the declaration.
Kemp has restricted access to only two nursing homes — state-owned veterans’ facilities in Augusta and Milledgeville. He has not banned any public gatherings, which health experts say are places where the virus easily spreads.
Kemp has said repeatedly that he is following the guidance of the state’s epidemiologists. But to date, the Department of Public Health (DPH) has not allowed the media to interview any of those officials, and the state’s public health commissioner, Dr. Kathleen Toomey, has taken only a handful of questions during the governor’s press conferences.
A Harvard University epidemiologist said the state should take more drastic social-distancing steps to mitigate the spread of the disease. In an interview, he also criticized Georgia’s public information efforts around the outbreak, which have concentrated communication through the governor’s office rather than the state’s public health agency.
“I do not believe that press conferences with the boss farming out questions to the professional health officials is the way to provide accurate and credible communications about health,” said Marc Lipsitch, professor of epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
“The state should be implementing social distancing measures intensely in order to avoid an Italy-like situation,” he said. “If it is in South Dakota, it is nearly everywhere in the U.S. Minimizing it is setting us up for a catastrophic overloading of our hospitals.”
Gov: ‘clear and transparent’
In his news conference Thursday, Kemp defended the state’s dissemination of information.
“I think we’ve been very clear and transparent what our message is,” he said. “We’re going to continue to follow the facts and the science in our decision-making process.”
But many of those facts have been closely held.
It took three days for the state’s regulator of nursing homes and hospitals, the state Department of Community Health, to respond to AJC requests about what steps the agency was taking to protect patients.
It wasn’t until Thursday, 10 days after the first two coronavirus infection were reported in the state, that Georgia public health officials provided any information on testing capacity at the state laboratory. Toomey, the public health commissioner, said the lab was completing 50 tests a day — but she did not specify whether that includes multiple tests for some patients.
The lab is getting additional testing equipment, Toomey said, and more staff will be trained to conduct tests. But she did not say why needed equipment wasn’t already on hand, or why training had not taken place before the emergency.
Toomey also said two people in Bartow County who tested positive for the coronavirus attended the same church — but she declined to identify the church, leaving Bartow residents to wonder what risk they faced.
By contrast, District of Columbia officials announced that a priest at Christ Church Georgetown had tested positive for the virus after serving communion and greeting hundreds of parishioners.
Anna Adams, VP of governmental relations with Georgia Hospital Association, said DPH has been very responsive to hospitals’ questions, although the agency is swamped with calls from around the state.
“It seems like things have been changing so quickly,” she said. “Because this is not something we’ve dealt with in the United States or Georgia in particular we’re taking it one day at a time.”
Detailed data from some states
Late Thursday, Georgia’s Department of Public Health launched a new web page to share information about the outbreak, but details there are sparse, too.
The page, accessible through a link on the department’s website, contains a static map that highlights counties where cases have been detected. But it offers no specifics about those cases. The page also gives the total number of confirmed cases, along with the one death reported so far, and pie charts breaking down the cases by age group and gender.
Many other states have far more robust web presences.
In Florida, for instance, a state website lists each confirmed case, reporting the county where the victim resides, the person’s gender and age and whether he or she had traveled outside the United States.
Florida also reports on the total number of tests performed so far, including how many had negative results, and on how many people are currently under public health monitoring and how many have been observed since the outbreak began.
