Georgia Governor Brian Kemp will reopen parts of the state's economy beginning this week with a slightly wider to follow next week and he's doing this without any plans in place for widescale testing or contact tracing, but he's also doing it without a plan for anything else.
In very Trumpian fashion, Governor Kemp appears to have made the reopening announcement without consulting his own coronavirus task force.
Key members of the coronavirus task force Gov. Brian Kemp tapped to shape the state’s pandemic strategy said they didn’t know about his decision to reopen some shuttered businesses until he announced it at a press conference.
In interviews and public statements, a half-dozen members of the task force said they only learned about Kemp’s move to let barber shops, theaters and dine-in restaurants begin to resume operations after he made it public. [...]
Bernice King, a co-chair of the community outreach committee, said in a video she was considering stepping down after she found out about Kemp’s plans from a text message from a friend.
Is Governor Kemp doing this to please Trump, or is he just an idiot? These are not mutually exclusive options and I don't know which is worse.
You may recall that Kemp was among the last governors to issue a stay-at-home order and, when he gave the order, he said he just found out that the virus could be spread by people who display no symptoms. That was two months after the rest of the world knew that; two months after his own health department knew that.
I can't say that the people of Georgia are getting what they deserve by electing Kemp because most of the state either voted for Stacey Abrams or they were prevented from voting at all by Kemp himself. As the former secretary of state, Kemp closed numerous polling locations in black neighborhoods and purged the voter rolls of predominately black voters.
The same black voters who were disenfranchised by Brian Kemp are also at the highest risk of being sickened or killed by Kemp's decision to reopen the state too soon.