In the face of a global pandemic that's spurred a public health crisis in the United States, governors across the country have issued stay-at-home orders to curb the spread of the virus.
Georgia's Republican governor, Brian Kemp, had held off on issuing this order until this past Wednesday after repeatedly refusing to do so.
What caused his change of heart? He'd learned in the past 24 hours that people could contract the virus without experiencing symptoms, thereby spreading the virus despite thinking they're healthy.
Watch below.
Kemp said:
"What we've been telling people from directives from the CDC for weeks now that if you start feeling bad, stay home. Those individuals could've been infecting people before they ever felt bad. Well, we didn't know that until the past 24 hours."
There's just one problem.
Asymptomatic transmission has been widely reported on since at least February. The growing number of asymptomatic transmissions has been a huge impetus for governors issuing shelter in place orders for every state's resident, despite symptoms.
Over 150 people in Georgia have died of the virus.
Kemp's admission that this was new information to him only indicated deadly ineptitude.
Kemp narrowly won his gubernatorial election against Democrat Stacey Abrams in 2018. He sparked controversy by not resigning from his post as Secretary of State during the campaign, despite the blatant conflict of interest in Kemp overseeing an election in which he was a candidate.
Kemp's office delayed the registrations of 53,000 voters without notifying them, and 300,000 voters were wrongly flagged as ineligible to cast their ballots. These measures disproportionately affected Black voters, with whom Abrams was polling at 90 percent.
She would lose the election by only two points.
People wondered what leadership Georgia would be seeing in the face of this pandemic had Kemp not used his position as secretary to suppress voter turnout.
Voter suppression kills. So does ignorance.
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