Bill Kemp, the Governor of Georgia, just in the last day issued a stay-at-home directive for his state. But the astonishing thing is how he explained the lateness of his decision. Here is what he said, in his own words:
“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 ever felt bad. But we didn’t know that until the last 24 hours.”
There is clearly something wrong with this statement. As we all know, the CDC made has been warning since mid-February about documented cases of asymptomatic transmission.
Which brings us to the most interesting word in Kemp’s announcement.
That word is “we”. When Kemp says that “we” didn’t know, who else could the governor possibly be referring to, in addition to himself? After all, Americans have been glued to the TV for weeks, so we have all been quite aware for some time that asymptomatic transmission of COVID19 is a very real and present danger.
I did some research, and came up with some candidates. At the governor’s mansion they have a German shepherd named Rhett and a golden retriever named Bailey. And at their farm in Athens, Georgia, the Kemps keep a horse named Lula, a goat named Butterscotch, and a sheep named Miracle.
So there you have it. If we simply expand beyond the restrictive category of “must be human”, we indeed find individuals in Kemp’s personal sphere who would not have known about the dangers of asymptomatic transmission. So I could be convinced to take the good governor at his word.
But it might take a Miracle.