It wasn’t easy for Jenny Hunter to send her kids back to school this fall, but she knew she was the most productive of the two possible options for her family.
“I am well aware of clinical threats to children,” Hunter, a nurse and mother of two in Cherokee County, just outside Atlanta, told USA TODAY on Wednesday afternoon. “I am not a teacher, nor is I my husband. I felt that gaining advantages over the threat is greater to get them used for their education.”
Minutes after hanging up, Hunter won a text message from his son: his best school would temporarily close for two weeks after 14 academics tested positive for coronavirus.
“I wasn’t surprised at all, ” said Hunter. “My son said how small some of his categories were on the day because of the quarantined children. It had become a question of when, it is not.
More than 1,600 academics and staff are quarantined this week as cases in Georgia, a state that has been criticized for its combined signals about the coronavirus pandemic, increase.
Among the latest states that have instituted an on-site shelter ordinance and the first to reopen business, Georgia is now experiencing an increasing number of COVID-19-related deaths. The state reported 136 deaths on Tuesday, its highest number on a non-married day since the pandemic began, and another 109 deaths on Wednesday, according to the state fitness ministry.
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Dr. Harry Heiman, a professor at Georgia State University’s School of Public Health, said that with a large number of hospitalizations and comprehensive and comprehensive care sets in the state, the mortality rate is expected to continue to rise.
“Georgia is an example of what happens when leaders adopt a practical technique for managing a pandemic,” Heiman said. “There are transparent policies and practices that we know can control this pandemic. Frankly, we don’t do any of those things in our state.”
Georgia is doing better than other states, but it’s not moving in the right direction. Georgia has the fifth highest number of COVID-19 cases (the seventh according to the capita) and the fourth highest number of hospitalizations, New York, Florida and New Jersey, as known by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The state is in the middle of the package in terms of consistency with coronavirus cap and has performed approximately 1.9 million tests. Approximately 10% of these tests test positive, meaning Georgia is one of 36 states that do not meet the average positivity rate of 5% through the World Health Organization to reopen business.
Ben Lopman, a professor of epidemiology at the Emory University Rollins School of Public Health, said the state’s approach has been “cavalier.”
“We’ve received conflicting messages about the masks, the governor is looking to prevent local leaders like Atlanta’s mayor from court ordering,” Lopman said. “The network transmission effort has been weak, so it is not safe to open schools. Students, as well as teachers and parents, have set the stage for state inaction.
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After reporting a public fitness emergency in March, Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp signed a shelter order at the site in early April. The order eased some of the restrictions that cities and counties had put in position to combat the spread of coronavirus, infuriating some local officials.
The mayor of Tybee Island, a small coastal town near Savannah, called the resolution a “reckless mandate” that endangers citizens and visitors to the city. “While the Pentagon ordered 100,000 bags of frames to buy the bodies of Americans killed by coronavirus, Gov. Brian Kemp dictated that Georgia’s beaches reopened and said that any lawmaker who refuses to comply with orders will incur imprisonment and/or fines,” he said. Mayor Shirley Sessions at the time.
Local officials said they went blind weeks later when Kemp announced plans to reopen some Georgian businesses, adding gymnasiums, bowling alleys and beauty and manicure salons, although there is no evidence of a 14-day downward trend in cases, a measure through White Casa Coronavirus’s Working Group. Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms and others criticized the decision.
“In fact we are lost and I am concerned as the mother and mayor of our capital,” Bottoms said at the time. “I can’t find the words we’ve opened up in this way. Array… Seeing knowledge and talking to our public fitness officials, I don’t see it based on anything logical.”
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However, some Georgia commercial homeowners said they were ahead of the reopening. At that time, more than 16% of the Georgian workforce had been deployed for unemployment last month, and protests were taking place against domestic maintenance orders across the country.
Cases in Georgia increased from March to mid-June, when the country’s epicenter became New York.
In April, the state opened a transit hospital at one of the nation’s largest conference centers, the Georgia World Congress Center, but closed in May. This month, Kemp announced that summer camps would be allowed to reopen in Georgia and that about 260 more people at a one-night summer camp would test positive for coronavirus.
The new instances in Georgia began to increase in mid-June, as the Georgia Department of Public Health knows. It was at this time that the governor signed two decrees that prolonged the state’s public conditioning emergency and existing security measures against COVID-19.
A month later, when several states implemented the needs of face masks to curb the spread of COVID-19, Kemp signed an executive order prohibiting towns and counties from making masks mandatory, and sued Bottoms and Atlanta City Council, saying they exceeded their authority by demanding masks.
A few days later, Kemp suggested that citizens wear a mask in public, saying that “it is the network that defeats this virus, the government.”
Dr. Saad Omer, director of the Yale Institute for Global Health and a former Georgia resident for 11 years, said he was first surprised that Georgia was “doing everything possible” to prevent local jurisdictions from implementing their own mandates, especially because of light. the preponderance of public fitness experts in the state, houses the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“There’s no shortage of experience here, so I’m involved in that,” Omer said. “It sends the signal more broadly that such measures are not only important, but that they must be opposed.”
Some citizens would possibly have understood this message. Since mid-July, the state has recorded an average of more than 3,000 new cases in line with the day, and Kemp has reopened the transitority atlanta hospital. On Thursday, Georgia was only Florida and Mississippi in terms of new case rates consistent with the capita, according to Johns Hopkins University’s knowledge.
“We don’t broadcast in the community,” said Lopman, professor of epidemiology at Emory. “Without doing this first, schools in users will be the scene of epidemics and magnify transmission in the community at large.”
Meanwhile, several school districts in Georgia attracted national attention last week as images of masked scholars and crowded corridors went viral on social media. Many of these districts are now experiencing COVID-19 infections.
By Thursday, more than 80 academics and the Cherokee County School District had tested positive for the virus since schools reopened on August 3, and nearly 1,400 academics and dozens were quarantined. Nearby counties of Paulding and Gwinnett have also experienced epidemics.
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Despite the outbreaks, Kemp said Monday that the school’s reopening is going “fine.”
“There will be disorder when you open something. We saw him when we opened business. We see that when we open schools,” Kemp said at a news convention with U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Adams. “Honestly, this week went very well, apart from some virtual photos.”
Health experts say Georgia can take transparent steps to stem the epidemic. More than 3,000 health care staff members wrote two letters to the governor last month, begging him to “review” the state’s COVID-19 strategy and put policies into force through the White House Coronavirus Working Group, such as requiring citizens to wear mask in public. . Array Limit social gatherings to 10 other people or less and final bars and gyms.
“We don’t want a general lock, but we want to take an evidence-based ActionArray … that is aligned with what we know how to work,” said Heiman, Georgia’s state professor. “It’s a very manageable pandemic if we had the kind of leadership we wanted at the national and state level.”
Georgia will have to act now, before the bloodless weather comes, Omer said.
“Believe it or not, it is the low season for the virus in the sense that the virus is transmitted under suboptimal conditions. Humidity is high. The temperature is high,” he said. “When autumn comes, Array … it’ll get colder. There will be more inconveniences and greater conditions of movement.”
In the future, Jenny Hunter said she would like her children’s schools to put policies on masks into effect. Hunter said he encourages his children to wear his mask but is not there for them at school.
“They handle dress codes every day in schools. Girls can’t wear a blouse that’s not 3 inches wide. Why it shouldn’t be obligatory, especially with older children, I don’t understand,” he said. “If you think the mask doesn’t do anything, let your surgeon know the next time you move to an operating room, and he may not have to use theirs.”
Contributor: Wyatte Grantham-Philips
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