April 2, 2020

What On Earth Is the Governor of Georgia Talking About?

Alyssa Pointer/Atlanta Journal-Constitution/ZUMA

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On Wednesday, Georgia Republican Gov. Brian Kemp issued a stay-at-home order, effective Friday, in an effort to combat the spread of COVID-19 in the state. Some parts of Georgia were already under such orders, thanks to local officials, and other parts of the country had begun taking such steps weeks earlier.

Kemp, like a number of other Trump-friendly Republican governors, had put off the inevitable for days. Why now? He’d just found out “that this virus is now transmitting before people see signs,” Kemp explained. “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 have been infecting people before they even felt bad. Well we didn’t know that until the last 24 hours.”

I’m sorry, what? What on Earth?

It’s true that, this week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced that as many as 25 percent of people carrying the virus might be asymptomatic. That’s a new and ominous chunk of data supporting the idea that you can still transmit the virus even if you don’t feel sick. But it’s not a new idea. People have been talking about asymptomatic people transmitting coronavirus for a long time now.

“Infected people without symptoms might be driving the spread of Coronavirus more than we realized,” blared one CNN headline on March 19th, exactly 14 days ago.

“Coronavirus spreads quickly and sometimes before people have symptoms, study finds”—that was Science Daily on March 16, reporting on a study from the University of Texas.

On March 5, a group of German doctors reported to the New England Journal of Medicine “a case of 2019-nCoV infection acquired outside Asia in which transmission appears to have occurred during the incubation period in the index patient”—an asymptomatic transmission.

I mean, we know all of this. How come Brian Kemp didn’t?

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THE FACTS SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES.

At least we hope they will, because that’s our approach to raising the $350,000 in online donations we need right now—during our high-stakes December fundraising push.

It’s the most important month of the year for our fundraising, with upward of 15 percent of our annual online total coming in during the final week—and there’s a lot to say about why Mother Jones’ journalism, and thus hitting that big number, matters tremendously right now.

But you told us fundraising is annoying—with the gimmicks, overwrought tone, manipulative language, and sheer volume of urgent URGENT URGENT!!! content we’re all bombarded with. It sure can be.

So we’re going to try making this as un-annoying as possible. In “Let the Facts Speak for Themselves” we give it our best shot, answering three questions that most any fundraising should try to speak to: Why us, why now, why does it matter?

The upshot? Mother Jones does journalism you don’t find elsewhere: in-depth, time-intensive, ahead-of-the-curve reporting on underreported beats. We operate on razor-thin margins in an unfathomably hard news business, and can’t afford to come up short on these online goals. And given everything, reporting like ours is vital right now.

If you can afford to part with a few bucks, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones with a much-needed year-end donation. And please do it now, while you’re thinking about it—with fewer people paying attention to the news like you are, we need everyone with us to get there.

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