The Georgia Senate passed legislation Tuesday aimed at shielding businesses and health-care providers from lawsuits filed by people who have contracted coronavirus since March.

House Bill 167 would block lawsuits from being filed unless businesses or hospitals willfully disregarded social distancing and sanitizing rules put in place by Gov. Brian Kemp.

It would apply to lawsuits brought by people who contracted coronavirus on a broad range of properties including hospitals, government offices, businesses and sports facilities.

The bill would also apply to persons who were sickened by the current strain of coronavirus, COVID-19, as well as any mutations of that strain.

The liability protections are designed to give businesses and hospitals relief from worries that they will be hammered by litigation as coronavirus infections continue and Georgia businesses reopen amid relaxed social distancing rules, said Sen. John Kennedy, R-Macon.

“We can provide them some stability and, very importantly, provide them predictability,” said Kennedy, who brought the changes that added liability protections to the bill.

The bill passed by a nearly party-line vote in the Senate and now heads to the state House of Representatives.

Like other bills being taken up in the final days of the 2020 legislative session, House Bill 167 originally did not deal with coronavirus liability protections. It was changed late last week in the Senate Committee on Insurance and Labor.

Discussions on how much to protect businesses and hospitals will likely continue as legislation winds through the General Assembly this week.

On Tuesday, Senate lawmakers spent more than an hour debating how broadly to guard businesses and health-care providers from lawsuits, particularly whether they should be liable for “gross negligence.”

That legal threshold was proposed in an amendment that failed on the Senate floor. However, the gross-negligence standard is still in a separate liability-protection measure, House Bill 216, that passed out of a Senate committee last week.

Kennedy argued gross negligence would set the bar too low and could prompt a wave of litigation.

“That’s not the message we need to be sending to businesses,” Kennedy said. “That’s not the message we need to be sending to constituents.”

Some lawmakers argued taking out the gross-negligence standard would leave businesses and hospitals liable only for intentionally infecting people with coronavirus.

“That’s tantamount to injecting someone with COVID,” said Sen. Jesse Stone, R-Waynesboro.

Others worried the liability protections might cover too many facilities such as nursing homes that may have fallen short in curbing the spread of the virus among vulnerable elderly Georgians.

“They basically get immunity for not caring for the most vulnerable people in our state,” said Sen. Jen Jordan, D-Atlanta.

And still others argued the protections outlined in the bill were just right. They included Sen. Ben Watson, a physician, who said Tuesday he had treated many patients for coronavirus in the past few months.

“The hospitals and health-care providers have been doing the best we can,” said Watson, R-Savannah. “This bill is a good bill. It is intentioned correctly.”