ATLANTA — Georgia’s COVID-19 infections continue to slowly decline, but measuring success is difficult because fewer people are getting tested.
While the state inches closer to flatting the curve, so few people are getting tested, the state closed a massive testing site near the Atlanta airport last week.
Health experts said Georgia is far from out of the woods, especially as flu season nears.
Numbers released by the Georgia Department of Health actually show some counties experiencing a surge in positivity rates.
One of those continues includes Clarke County, where the University of Georgia is located. The number of people testing positive there has increasing from a 5.7 percent positivity rate in in early June to nearly twice as high today.
University of Georgia health policy professor David Bradford said this is not the time to take our foot off the gas. He predicts a drop in testing is due to people growing complacent.
Second, there’s political motivation to compel people not to get tested to keep the infections down.
“This is not the time to be complacent to take our foot off of the accelerator of ramping up testing. We’re about to move into a phase that we would naturally expect that disease would become more problematic,” Bradford said.
Hall county is also seeing a surge in positive cases. Nationwide, about a thousand people a day continue to die of COVID-19 complications, a number that has largely stayed consistent over the summer.
"As the regular seasonal flu starts to take hold and that further weakens people’s immune system, there’s every reason to expect increases in COVID rates everywhere," Bradford explained.