Georgia’s Coronavirus Crisis Is Being Covered Up
Since Georgia’s Republican Gov. Brian Kemp reopened the economy, infection rates have skyrocketed. But the state has found a way to deal with the problem — by making the surge of new cases disappear from the government’s official COVID-19 tracking website.
Georgia governor Brian Kemp during a press conference on the coronavirus outbreak, at the Georgia State Capitol on April 27, 2020 in Atlanta, Georgia. (Kevin C. Cox / Getty Images)
As Georgia has become one of the world’s COVID-19 hotspots, Republican gov. Brian Kemp has swatted away pressure from experts to shut down the economy, and he has taken punitive action against localities that try to impose mask mandates. It now appears that his administration is also obscuring a graphical presentation of coronavirus data on the state’s Department of Public Health website, the central clearinghouse for information on the public health crisis.
Specifically, as infection rates have skyrocketed, Kemp administration officials have shifted the color-coding of Georgia’s virus tracking map in ways that make it seem as if nothing is changing.
The revelations are the latest example of states obscuring hard data about the pandemic. In May, it was revealed that Texas, Vermont, and Virginia were artificially inflating their perceived testing capacity by combining the totals of the antibody tests and the regular COVID-19 tests. Under scrutiny, all three states changed their reporting method to record the different test types separately.
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