ATLANTA—As many hospitals across the states near capacity amid another COVID surge, Gov. Brian Kemp announced Monday the state will more than double the amount of staff in hospitals across Georgia.  

“Virtually every hospital’s pressing issue is lack of qualified staff to treat patients coming through their doors,” Kemp said.  

The staffing shortages include nurses, respiratory therapists and ICU personnel. While the state had previously committed $500 million to provide 1,300 staff members to 68 hospitals, Kemp announced at a press conference an added $125 million to provide an extra 1,500 personnel for hospitals.

An estimated 170 of those new staff positions will go directly toward propping up rural hospitals, Kemp said. 

“Our hospitals are full. Our ICU is full. Our emergency departments and waiting rooms are full,” said Darcy Craven, CEO of Archbold Medical Center in Thomasville last week. “As you can imagine, this creates an environment at our facilities for our employees and frontline staff members that is highly challenging and stressful.”

Kemp said 450 additional hospital beds and nine regional coordinating hospitals will also be coming, with the additional staff.  

“I think the additional staffing is going to continue to help them with the surge we’re going through, especially hospitals on the coast, south Georgia and our more rural hospitals,” Kemp said. “This will also help them be able to keep the employees they have so they won’t go elsewhere.”

Georgia Public Health Commissioner Kathleen Toomey said 90 percent of new COVID cases are the result of the delta variant.

“This variant is much more transmissible, it goes very quickly from person to person and causes you to become infected much more quickly, in a matter of days,” she said. 

Likely due to the majority of the senior citizen population being vaccinated, Toomey said positivity rates have increased in the younger population, those in their 30s to 50s. 

Toomey said public health departments will be increasing the number of testing locations, especially in communities where testing locations are not easily accessible. 

“We want to do everything we can to keep people away from emergency rooms that are overwhelmed right now if they don’t need to be in the emergency rooms,” she said.   

Kemp also announced that state offices will be closed on Friday, Sept. 3, ahead of Labor Day, in hopes that unvaccinated state employees will get the vaccine.  

He stood firm on his decision to not mandate mask wearing or vaccines in Georgia, citing vaccine hesitancy from Blacks and “conservative, white rural Republicans,” an issue which has caused in-fighting in various school jurisdictions around the state.

A statewide mandate would be “counterproductive,” he said. 

“I’m very confident [local districts] know how to deal with any issues. If they need to go virtual for one week or two weeks or delay as some systems are doing, I’m certainly supportive of that,” Kemp said. “We also have systems that are going on their third full week of instruction and they’re doing just fine. That’s why I think the best approach is a local one…letting the schools deal with that individual situation they have is better than a one-size-fits-all overarching policy from the state or federal government.”