Morning Reads — Thursday, August 5, 2021

I hope we all remember how little Republicans in Georgia have done to keep folks safe. Kemp, the UGA administration, and Republican legislators all have failed us. How about some damn leadership and some compassion. No they would rather score brownie points with folks who are too dumb to realize the danger.

From Athens
“Our Hot Townie Summer is over. One month ago, COVID-19 had been virtually wiped out in Clarke County, with fewer than two cases reported per day. Thanks to vaccines, life had started to return to normal.
Then the Delta variant hit. Now cases have increased fifteenfold, and they’re still rising, with K-12 classes starting up this week, tens of thousands of unvaccinated University of Georgia students poised to move back to town and football season looming.
However, don’t expect any action from the state government, in spite of public health experts like Toomey’s expectation that the current surge will get worse. “Georgia will not lock down or impose statewide mask mandates,” Gov. Brian Kemp announced on social media last week.
That led Amber Schmidtke, a microbiologist who’s tracking the pandemic in Georgia, to say Kemp “has no other strategy than to let Georgia burn.” In her weekly newsletter, Schmidtke described how unvaccinated people with the Delta variant are filling up hospitals across the South, and how children are more susceptible to the Delta variant than previous strains:
“So when this starts to happen in a bigger way in Georgia, and kids who were previously healthy are on ventilators, I don’t want school superintendents to claim that there was no way this could have been predicted. We have plenty of warning that the situation in 2021 is more dangerous than a year ago for children. Willingly choosing to endanger children by not doing the bare minimum of disease control and prevention should be treated the same way as knowingly allowing someone drunk to drive a school bus, and organizations that do so should be held to account. They don’t get to push the blame to someone else after they dismiss CDC guidance. Georgia children are going to end up in the hospital or worse. In addition, they will go home to families where they spread the disease to others, some of whom may be immunocompromised [think pregnant moms—it’s more common than you think], older grandparents and others with underlying medical conditions. The liability alone would scare me enough as a superintendent to enact a mask mandate at the elementary level at the very minimum where none of the kids are eligible for a vaccine.”

The Clarke County School District has shifted course on masks several times, and last week announced that everyone—all students, staff and visitors, regardless of vaccination status—is required to wear a mask while inside schools (see p.6 for more). But other area school districts are not requiring masks.
In fact, the situation looks very much like it did this time last year. On Aug. 3, 2020, Clarke County had an average of 41 new cases per day, not much higher than now. At the time, UGA had the third-most COVID cases of any university in the country—before classes had even started. What followed, once UGA resumed in-person classes, was a month-long surge of historic proportions. By Sept. 6, Clarke County was averaging 156 new cases per day.

Meanwhile, the University of Georgia is doing little to ensure that incoming students are vaccinated. President Jere Morehead and other top administrators sent a mass email to students, staff and faculty urging them to “contemplate this matter very carefully.” The university is also giving away a free T-shirt and $20 gift card to students who are vaccinated at the University Health Center.”
https://flagpole.com/featured/2021/08/04/another-covid-surge-is-hitting-athens/