Gov. Kemp tours Hall County areas hard-hit by coronavirus

HALL COUNTY, Ga. — Gov. Kemp spent the day Friday touring areas in Hall County, which has become a growing hotspot for the coronavirus in Georgia.

Channel 2′s Richard Elliot went along with the governor as officials stopped at Northeast Georgia Medical Center, a pop-up testing site and the Fieldale poultry plant.

In Hall County, at least 2,000 people have come down with the virus. Forty people have died. The county has the highest rate of cases in metro Atlanta. There are just over 1,000 cases for every 100,000 people.

Latinos account for about half the positive cases in the county. We know that many work at the poultry plants in Gainesville.

Hall County is the heart of poultry production country in Georgia. Fieldale has 5,000 employees in plants across six northeast Georgia counties.

Of those 5,000, the company says 200 tested positive for COVID-19 and 75 percent have recovered and are back at work.

The plants are educating their employees on COVID-19 safety guidelines and encouraging them to take them home.

“What we learned in Hall County is that it wasn’t necessarily an issue of people getting infected in the plant. But it was the community spread once they left the plant,” Kemp said.

Kemp appointed Georgia insurance commissioner John King and tasked him to reach out to the Latino community to get the message out to stop the spread.

“We’re starting to see the numbers nudge,” King said. “But we have to make sure our medical professionals continue to look at the numbers, to make sure we can track this very carefully.”

“We’re really grateful the governor is here,” said Norma Hernandez.

Hernandez is one of the local leaders King reached out to and asked to help in the community. She helped organize the pop-up testing facility where Kemp visited Friday. Hernandez hoped to test a 1,000 people by the time they finished.

She said the message had to be a simple one: Get healthy, get back to work and do that by taking responsibility for your own health.

“We got the testing going and this is awesome. This is the heart of the Latino community and you will see that the community has come together,” Hernandez said.

Meanwhile at Northeast Georgia Medical Center, construction crews are working hard to get temporary medical pods built to help with patients.

The state built similar ones in Rome and Albany, where the governor says that hotspot seems to be calming down.

“Obviously, we know the strains that the hospital has been under,” Kemp said.

Last week, Northeast Georgia Medical Center told us it’s in critical need of PPE. At the time, the hospital’s beds were 50-to-80-percent full, and the critical care unit was 60-to-80 percent full.

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