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Georgia leads nation in COVID-19 per capita
Georgia is leading the nation in the number of new coronavirus cases per capita.
ATLANTA - Governor Brian Kemp defended Georgia's handling of the coronavirus pandemic at a press conference Wednesday, days after the latest numbers from President Donald Trump's coronavirus task force showed Georgia leads the nation in the number of new COVID-19 cases per capita.
FOX 5’s Alex Whittler spoke to a public health microbiologist to make sense of the data.
Experts said COVID-19 hospitalizations are down, as Governor Kemp emphasized Wednesday, but health experts also said less hospitals are releasing the data than before.
Many of Georgia’s coronavirus numbers are twice that of the national average, according to the task force, and experts, like microbiologist Amber Schmidtke, said focusing on one metric alone will not end the pandemic.
"I know we’d all love to see something optimistic because it’s so dire here in Georgia," Schmidtke, who once worked for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said.
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She said there is a lot of information out there, and as of right Wednesday, the number of people dying from the virus in Georgia is most alarming.
"It’s twice the national average and that’s too high for us to be willing to accept," she said.
New information from the White House Coronavirus Task force indicates Georgia tops the national charts for new COVID-19 cases per 100,000 population.
This, as other studies from the Harvard Institute of Global Health and Georgia Tech also claim Georgia leads the country in positive cases.
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Georgia governor responds to White House report on COVID-19 in the state
Gov. Brian Kemp responds to the recent White House report identifying Georgia as the leading state in the nation for new COVID-19 cases. The governor took issue with the report and with the media.
Governor Kemp took to the podium Wednesday, explaining not all information in the task force report is negative.
"Hospitalizations are down nearly 18 percent," he said.
Schmidtke said the Governor is right.
"Numerically, it looks like we’ve seen a 17% drop in hospitalizations on the report," she said.
Data indicates coronavirus hospitalizations are down, but Schmidtke said that could be for a variety of reasons.
"Another piece of information in the report said only 65% of hospitals are reporting those data, while last week, it was 81%. That decrease—I certainly hope it’s real, but we’re not getting a full picture, only two thirds of the data," she said.
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She said she knows the pandemic has exhausted the masses, but she warned focusing on one or some figures does not show the full picture.
"Go straight to the data," Schmidtke said.
"The data don’t have an agenda. People can pick out their favorite pieces of data, but it’s important to look at more than one metric, not just cases, but deaths and hospitalizations."