Gov. Kemp Is Failing Georgia
Side note: yesterday was yet another record-breaking day forCovid-19 in Georgia with 2,464 new cases . Our previous record was Monday with 2,016 cases. That broke the record set six days before.
Ignoring the data that shows masks have as much as 75% percent efficacy preventing the spread of Covid-19, Governor Kemp relied on good ole hopes and prayers.
“We shouldn’t need a mask mandate for people to do the right thing.” That tacitly contradicts the need for a “Wear a Mask” tour but no one asked me. And we have plenty of evidence that, yes, people very often need a mandate to do the right thing.
Kemp added: “There’s a lot of people that don’t believe a mask mandate would work.”
Of those people, none are experts and the rest are leaders of a state that by no metric has the coronavirus outbreak under control. Either way, the job of a governor and a leader is to make the hard decisions that people don’t like. Is it uncomfy to wear a mask? Sure, but it must be done. Or we need to just content ourselves that 3,000 Georgians are going to die because of Covid-19 before the summer’s end.
If that doesn’t sound like terribly high number just consider that that’s how many road fatalities there were in Georgia in 2019 and 2018 combined. And consider how much effort we accept to reduced those numbers. Then consider how much more expensive they are for the state and more onerous for citizens than mandating mask usage (and they are arguably less efficacious).
There’s no other way to say it: we really ought to be ashamed of ourselves.
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We are truly in interesting times:
JULY 01, 2020 Atlanta – The Georgia Department of Public Health (DPH) in collaboration with the Georgia Department of Agriculture, the University of Georgia College of Veterinary Medicine, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), is confirming SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, in a pet dog. This is only the second dog known to test positive for SARS-CoV-2 in the United States. The 6-year-old mixed breed dog developed sudden onset of neurological illness which progressed rapidly over the course of a couple of days, and was humanely euthanized. The owners of the dog recently tested positive for COVID-19, but the dog did not have any evidence of respiratory disease. Out of an abundance of caution, a SARS-CoV-2 test was performed on the dog. The presumptive positive result was confirmed by the USDA National Veterinary Services Laboratory. While the dog did test positive for SARS-CoV-2, the progressive neurological illness was caused by another condition. https://dph.georgia.gov/press-releases/2020-07-01/dog-georgia-tests-positive-virus-causes-covid-19