Coronavirus: GA Deaths Near 2,000 As Testing Accelerates

ATLANTA, GA — As Georgia continues to ramp up its testing efforts, Thursday’s midday numbers show more than 45,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in Georgia and nearly 2,000 deaths.

At 1 p.m. Thursday, the Georgia Department of Public Health reported 523,359 tests for COVID-19, of which about 15 percent are the less reliable antibody tests. From those tests, Georgia reports 45,070 cases of COVID-19. That’s about 9 percent positive, a slight increase from previous numbers.

So far Georgia has recorded 1,962 deaths from the coronavirus, with 7,767 hospitalizations and 1,761 admissions to an intensive-care unit.

Counties in or near metro Atlanta continue to have the highest number of cases, with Fulton County in first place with 4,325 confirmed positives. DeKalb is second with 3,604, Gwinnett is third with 3,549, Cobb is fourth with 2,924 and Hall is fifth with 2,441. Today’s statistics also identify 1,497 cases of COVID-19 as from “unknown” counties, with 1,929 cases counted as “Non-Georgia.”

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Fulton County reports the most deaths, with 219, followed by Cobb County, with 164. Dougherty County in southwest Georgia, site of the state’s earliest hotspot, is third with 143 deaths. Rounding out the top five counties are Gwinnett in fourth with 126 deaths and DeKalb in fifth with 113 deaths.

While all 159 counties in Georgia have by now reported at least one case of COVID-19, about 37 percent of them — all rural — have reported no more than one death. Twenty-eight counties — again, all rural — have reported no deaths at all. Still, that’s a smaller percentage and fewer counties than just a few days ago, when 31 counties reported no deaths.

Some of the state’s poorest counties in south Georgia have seen alarming rises in case rates per 100,000 population. Randolph County is the worst off with 2605.86 per 100,000. Second and third are Terrell and Echols counties, with 2539.27 and 2519.53 respectively.

Gov. Brian Kemp continues to promote testing as the best means to gauge how quickly Georgia should reopen. On Thursday morning, Kemp tweeted a link to a list of private businesses like CVS, Walgreens and Walmart that offer testing for COVID-19.

Thanks to the support of the Trump Administration, we continue to increase testing capacity and availability in our state. Georgians can find community-based COVID-19 testing sites here: https://t.co/zcsKNym0IW
— Governor Brian P. Kemp (@GovKemp) May 28, 2020

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