He Committed Murder

He has no intention of paying for his crimes, don’t fear:

Gov. Brian Kemp on Wednesday extended Georgia’s coronavirus restrictions while explicitly banning cities and counties from adopting rules requiring masks or other face coverings, a measure that could bolster the state’s case in a possible legal battle.

Kemp’s executive order — which was set to expire Wednesday evening — still encourages, rather than requires, Georgians to wear masks in public. The governor has called such a requirement “a bridge too far,” and his office has said local mandates are unenforceable.

The governor’s coronavirus orders have for months banned local governments from taking more restrictive or lenient steps than the state. But the new set of rules he signed on Wednesday specified for the first time that cities and counties can’t require the use of masks or other face coverings.

The aristrocrats local control!

Great to see Kemp actively intervene to protect the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men, the right to infect somebody’s grandmother with a disease that could cause her to choke to death alone because you don’t want to wear a mask at the Piggly Wiggly.

The situation in Arizona, meanwhile, is almost incomprehensibly dire:

In the state with the highest per-capita rate of Covid-19 cases in America over the past week, Arizonans are waiting up to eight hours in the broiling hot sun to get tested. A metropolitan area of a million people was down to 17 free ICU beds Tuesday. A top health official in the largest county said the coronavirus is now so widespread that contact tracing is almost ineffective.

Local officials and public health experts coping with the coronavirus pandemic in Arizona say the state was lucky to avoid a large outbreak in the spring, but that instead of using the time to prepare for a future wave, political leaders assumed the situation was already well in hand.

A full-throttle reopening in May that drew crowds to bars and restaurants, a failure to increase testing and a lack of contact tracing have fueled an avoidable crisis, they said. Now, 26.46% of tests in the past seven days have come back positive, the highest rate in the nation, according to Johns Hopkins University data. And some 3,000 people are hospitalized with Covid-19 daily, compared to 789 two months ago, when the state first reopened.

In Maricopa County, home to Phoenix and the third highest number of cases in the country, officials said the virus is so widespread that contact tracing is no longer effective.

What’s astonishing is that Kemp, Ducey, DeSantis and the other little Trumps think they’re helping Trump by turning their states into killing fields.