Cash-Strapped Businesses Reopen In Georgia As 16 States Join Push To End Lockdowns

Across the US, 16 states are moving to reopen more nonessential businesses as thousands protest around the country demanding that the country be reopened now, even as governors like Andrew Cuomo advise that a recent slowdown in deaths and diagnoses suggests the lockdown is working well.

Of these, Georgia has emerged as the most aggressive, with Gov. Brian Kemp allowing the first ‘nonessential’ businesses – a group including salons, bowling allies, tattoo parlors and gyms – to reopen.  Even President Trump is now denying that he supported Kemp’s plan, a disavowal that was reportedly news to Kemp.

Mayors from the across state have warned residents that it’s too soon to return to some semblance of normal, and have urged businesses to remain close, and people to remain indoors. In many areas, as the Washington Post reported Saturday, businesses appear to be following this advice.

And even the businesses that have opened aren’t operating at anything approaching full capacity, employees don masks and take other steps to ensure social distancing is maintained.

Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms appeared on CNN to clear up the “confusion” that she was was putting her voters’ lives at risk: Instead, she said that businesses and individuals should ignore Kemp’s order, adding that “nothing has changed.”

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She declared that the 37% increase in Georgia’s mortality rate over the last week is a clear indication that the state ‘isn’t ready’ to reopen.

“We are not on the other side of this,” Bottoms said. “It’s like we are in a tunnel, and rather than walking straight toward the light, we’re spinning around in circles. We’ll never get to the light if we don’t continue to do what we’ve done thus far, and that’s to separate ourselves socially from one another.”

In Waycross, the county seat of Ware County, one salon owner told WaPo that the only people working on Friday and Saturday were those who absolutely needed to.

Only a handful of the 18 hairdressers who work at Salon Cheveux came in on Friday. They donned masks, spaced their workstations apart and screened inbound customers by phone with the dedication of hospital admission nurses: Any fever recently? Or contact with someone sick? Can you wear a mask?

It was the first day businesses reopened in Georgia, which is moving faster than any other state to ease restrictions amid the novel coronavirus pandemic. As a result, Georgia has become a flash point in the battle over whether it is time to remove the shutdown orders that have kept much of the country indoors.

Jamie McQuaig glanced at the two cosmetologists, clad in masks, coloring customers’ hair and wondered whether coming back to work was the right decision for her family, her salon or her state.

“I do feel like it’s too soon, but it will probably always feel like it’s too soon because we’re all scared of the virus,” she said. The nation’s response to the pandemic has left many in her shop with difficult choices. “The ones that are going back to work right now are the ones that have got to. They’ve got to feed their children. They’ve got to pay their mortgage.”

Local officials in one particularly hard hit county have been begging Kemp to carve out an exemption for them, but he has so far refused.

If he doesn’t, those ‘hot spots’ could swiftly reinfect the entire state. In Albany, Georgia, a small city with an extraordinarily high number of cases per capita, the mayor, Bo Dorough said he continues to warn residents to stay inside and practice social distancing.

The worst outbreak in the state is still raging in Dougherty County, where Albany is located. The county has a population of about 88,000, and the Georgia Department of Health has reported 1,465 confirmed cases of the virus and 108 deaths as of Friday evening. That means more than 1% of the county’s population is currently infected.

For a time, Dougherty County had the unwelcome distinction of having one of the highest number of per capita cases in the country.

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The virus ripped across the county after two widely attended funerals. One attendee, a 67-year-old man, who was at both funerals, later tested positive, setting off what’s called the “domino effect,” according to CNN.

Those Georgians who are returning to work have apparently accepted that they’re guinea pigs in a great national experiment with incredibly high stakes.

After weeks of unemployment, often with uneven government help, some said they were happy to be earning paychecks but worry about the ultimate costs of abandoning isolation too soon, according to the Washington Post.

But they won’t be the only ones for long. Tennessee’s governor has said he will allow many businesses to reopen after his shelter-in-place order expires next week. The governor of South Carolina has already said he will allow some retail stores to reopen this week. People have been walking on the beaches near Jacksonville, Fla., for a week, and on Friday, Iowa and Mississippi became the latest states to announce plans to reopen.

As of Saturday, there were nearly 4,500 confirmed in Iowa, and yet, Gov. Kim Reynolds has said she will consider reopening more businesses, while reversing a ban on hospitals performing non-essential surgeries. And in Mississippi, which has more than 5,400 confirmed Covid-19 cases, Gov. Tate Reeves has traded the4 state’s lockdown order for a “safer-at-home” order, which will remain in effect for two weeks, beginning Monday.

Across Georgia, more than 22,000 people have tested positive and nearly 900 have died. The state has tested

Trump was correct when he said on Thursday that Georgia hasn’t met the benchmarks released by the White House. They include a downward trajectory of confirmed cases over 14 days.

Here’s a map of the US breaking down what various states are planning, courtesy of the NYT:

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The big question looking ahead: Will Georgia’s decision make the state look like Sweden, or Wuhan?

Because it’s extremely likely that it’ll be one, or the other.