Savannah Reinstates COVID-19 Mask Mandate, Vaccinated Or Not

GEORGIA —With COVID-19 cases again on the rise — this time fueled by the more contagious delta variant — and vaccination numbers declining, the City of Savannah announced Monday that it would reinstate its mask mandate.

The order requires everyone not with family to wear masks while inside city buildings, schools, hospitals and buses, whether they're vaccinated or not. Masks are “strongly advised” in businesses and “highly recommended” in churches, but not mandated in either, according to The Savannah Morning News.

“I’m asking people: don’t complain, get vaccinated. Don’t complain, wear a mask,” said Mayor Van Johnson as quoted by the Savannah newspaper.

In 2020, Savannah was also the first major Georgia jurisdiction to insist that masks be worn while on city property.

Meanwhile, many Georgia school districts have announced that they will return to class with masks optional. That’s cause for concern, according to Amber Schmidtke, a Mercer University professor and immunology expert who studies the pandemic and has written about it since last year.

In her latest blog entry Friday, Schmidtke wrote that because children younger than 12 can’t be vaccinated and probably won’t be masked, their best hope for protection is that the adults around them get their shots.

“But unfortunately,” Schmidtke wrote, “our communities are coming up short on that responsibility. Meanwhile, ER visits for children and young adults for COVID-19 are surging.”

While children and young people are less likely to become seriously ill from COVID-19, it’s not impossible. Earlier in July, a 5-year-old Whitfield County boy with no known pre-existing conditions died of complications from COVID-19.

“While we were trying to avoid transmission with less transmissible variants, 11 Georgia children died of COVID-19,” Schmidtke wrote in her Friday blog post. “What happens when we put children into a school setting with a much more transmissible variant and no attempts to stop the transmission?”

According to data from the Mayo Clinic, only about 45 percent of Georgians — or close to 4.7 million people — have received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine. Only 38 percent are fully vaccinated. Among 50 states and the District of Columbia, Georgia is ranked 45th for the percentage of its residents vaccinated.

Georgia Coronavirus Numbers For July 26, 2021

The Georgia Department of Public Health in Atlanta reported a total of 922,346 confirmed cases of COVID-19 at 2:50 p.m. Monday, July 26. According to the health department's website, that includes 4,507 newly confirmed cases of COVID-19 since Friday. In addition, Georgia reported 1,853 new antigen-positive cases — which are considered to be probable cases of COVID-19 — since Friday

Georgia has reported 18,675 deaths so far from COVID-19, with 14 more confirmed deaths recorded since Friday. Georgia also reported 2,953 probable deaths from COVID-19 since the pandemic began. These probable deaths include fatalities with indirect evidence of COVID-19.

Georgia reported 66,492 hospitalizations and 11,314 admissions so far to intensive-care units.

No information is available from Georgia about how many patients have recovered.

Counties in or near metro Atlanta and other metropolitan areas continue to have the highest number of COVID-19 positives, with Gwinnett County in the lead and Fulton County close behind it. These statistics do not include antigen-positive cases.

1. Gwinnett County: 89,239 cases
2. Fulton County: 86,091 cases
3. Cobb County: 63,417 cases
4. DeKalb County: 60,397 cases
5. Hall County: 25,910 cases
6. Clayton County: 25,2911
7. Cherokee County: 23,183
8. Chatham County: 21,449
9. Richmond County: 20,750
10. Henry County: 20,401

Counties in or near metro Atlanta also continue to have the most deaths from COVID-19.

1. Fulton County: 1,375 deaths
2. Gwinnett County: 1,135 deaths
3. Cobb County: 1,027 deaths
4. DeKalb County: 996 deaths
5. Clayton County: 498 deaths
6. Hall County: 475 deaths
7. Chatham County: 443 deaths
8. Richmond County: 441 deaths
9. Muscogee County: 438 deaths
10. Bibb County: 423 deaths

All Georgia statistics are available on the state's COVID-19 website.

Globally, more than 194 million people have tested positive for COVID-19, and more than 4.1 million people have died from it, Johns Hopkins University reported Monday.

In the United States, almost 34.5 million people have been infected and more than 611,000 people have died from COVID-19 as of Saturday. The U.S. has only about 4 percent of the world's population but more confirmed cases and deaths than any other country.

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