Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp announced a statewide shelter-in-place order on Wednesday night in an effort to curtail the rapid spread of the coronavirus in his state.
Kemp had recently come under pressure to implement stricter measures, with several Georgia mayors surpassing Kemp to announce their own shelter-in-place orders, including in Atlanta, Savannah, and Athens.
In explaining the state’s more cautious response to the pandemic, Kemp said in a press conference that he only just found out that COVID-19 could be transmitted by people before they show symptoms, or what is known as “presymptomatic.”
“Those individuals could have been infecting people before they ever felt bad,” he said, “but we didn’t know that until the last 24 hours.”
Kemp said Dr. Kathleen E. Toomey, the commissioner of the Georgia Department of Public Health, called the news a “game-changer.”
