ATLANTA – Both COVID and monkeypox rates are starting to decline in Georgia, the state’s chief science officer said Tuesday during an update to the state Board of Public Health.
“Last week, we saw a 38% decline in [COVID] cases in Georgia,” said Dr. Cherie Drenzek, epidemiologist and chief science officer for the state Department of Public Health (DPH).
“Hospitalizations and deaths have also declined about 20% in the last two weeks,” Drenzek added, noting there are about 120 deaths per week in Georgia now.
Monkeypox infection rates are also starting to decline in Georgia, Drenzek said.
All told, there have been close to 1,600 cases in Georgia, with most of those in metro Atlanta. The majority of the people who have been infected have been men who have sex with men. Only 2% of those infected have been women.
And at least 50% of those diagnosed with monkeypox had also tested positive for a sexually transmitted infection in the last year, Drenzek said.
Dr. Alex Millman, Georgia’s chief medical officer, said the state’s monkeypox vaccine effort has focused on outreach to community groups, pop-up vaccine events, and social media messaging.
Currently, vaccines are administered across Georgia, and people can book appointments online through a DPH website.
The vaccines are indicated for people who have already been exposed to monkeypox or who have a high risk of being exposed, Millman said.
So far, around 22,000 first doses of the two-dose vaccine have been administered to Georgians, he said.
DPH administered more than 4,000 doses during the recent Atlanta Black Pride week, he said.
The DPH board approved a plan to continue meeting virtually each month and hold hybrid in-person/virtual meetings each quarter.
This story is available through a news partnership with Capitol Beat News Service, a project of the Georgia Press Educational Foundation.
ATLANTA – A committee of state senators met on the Georgia Tech campus Tuesday to learn how the state can boost its cybersecurity.
Industry and academic experts described how cyberthreats have evolved over the past decades to the committee chaired by Sen. Jason Anavitarte, R-Dallas.
“It’s our belief we need to leverage every asset that we have,” Anavitarte said, stressing the need for a bipartisan effort. “This cannot be territorial, this cannot be Republican versus Democrat.”
“One single incident can lead to a major disruption in business,” added David Levine, chief information security officer for RICO International, a Stone Mountain-based manufacturer. Levine and other experts said schools, hospitals, transportation and energy supplies are all at risk.
Georgians may recall the attack on the Colonial gas pipeline last year that stymied the flow of fuel on the East Coast or the ransomware attack on the city of Atlanta that gummed up computer operations for months in 2018.
Hackers target governments and businesses through emails and phishing. They can hold data from governments or businesses ransom for large sums of money and even delete essential files, several experts said. Typically, the motivation is money, Levine said.
As the threats have grown, so has the demand for skilled cybersecurity workers.
Georgia Tech founded a School of Cybersecurity and Privacy to help train cybersecurity experts.
The university sponsors advanced research as well as programs for undergraduates who get real-world experience helping governments and businesses fix cybersecurity problems.
Shorter-term training programs are also needed to rapidly grow the workforce, said Curley Henry, vice president and deputy chief information security officer for Georgia Power.
Another challenge is collecting and coordinating information about cybersecurity attacks. Companies understandably do not always want to disclose when they’ve been attacked, said Matt Guinn, a principal research scientist at Georgia Tech.
But a Georgia law that took effect last year requires government entities to report cyberattacks to the state’s Emergency Management and Homeland Security Agency.
“I believe that bill really helped … get in front of a problem once it occurs, rather than playing catch up,” said David Allen, the state’s chief information security officer.
Allen said it’s extremely rare for a cyber attacker to be prosecuted and convicted because the attacks are hard to trace and may involve multiple states or countries. Still, his office works closely with federal agents from the FBI, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, and the Secret Service to investigate attacks.
States like Ohio and Michigan have attempted to improve cybersecurity by creating civilian cybersecurity corps that can provide rapid responses to attacks, Allen said. The legislators appeared to be interested in the idea.
The committee plans to meet next in October.
This story is available through a news partnership with Capitol Beat News Service, a project of the Georgia Press Educational Foundation.
A group of community-clinic doctors describes the problems they face to a state House committee on Monday.
ATLANTA – Against the backdrop of hospital closures, state lawmakers Monday considered how to improve health care delivery across Georgia.
The House Governmental Affairs Local Service Delivery Subcommittee meeting – chaired by Rep. Darlene Taylor, R- Thomasville – gave doctors and health-care administrators a chance to explain how the state’s health system works – and where it is falling short.
Local public health departments play an important role in delivering preventive care, said R. Chris Rustin, public health administrator for the Chatham County Health Department.
The 159 county boards of health, which serve 10.8 million Georgians, can provide routine vaccinations and many other basic services, he said.
But different county public health departments have different resources. Rustin compared the robust complement of services offered in Chatham with the nearby – but much smaller – McIntosh County Health Department. Both are part of the same public health district but vary widely in what they can offer.
When it comes to COVID, Chatham County can provide vaccination services five days a week, while McIntosh only offers the service one day a week by appointment, Rustin said.
Earlier in the pandemic, when testing was hard to get, Chatham County provided drive-through testing services six days a week, while McIntosh had much more limited services.
A large public health department like Chatham’s can also offer extras like pediatric primary care, a dental clinic, a travel clinic, HIV care, and a garden to help people on public assistance programs access vegetables.
Rustin said public health departments all face staffing challenges. He said a career in a county health department is rewarding and comes with great benefits but pays below market rate, making staffing a challenge, especially in smaller counties like McIntosh.
Losing just one nurse in McIntosh amounts to losing half of the clinical staff, Rustin said.
No public health department will turn away a patient for lack of money, though the departments typically charge on an income-based sliding scale. They can also bill insurance, Rustin said.
Another important part of Georgia’s health care infrastructure is the federally qualified primary health clinics – or FQHCs.
The doctors who run these clinics said they treat the whole patient and are accessible to everyone, including people on Medicaid, Medicare and private insurance.
Challenges they face include transportation, staffing and providing dental care.
The doctors said rural Georgia communities need emergency services, even if the community cannot support a full hospital. A lack of emergency services puts pressure on both patients and health care providers from the emergency service technicians who respond to 911 calls to doctors in distant hospitals who have to treat patients who have waited a long time for care.
The doctors said they believed Medicaid expansion would benefit Georgia.
“We will figure out how to make it work,” said Dr. Steven Miracle of Georgia Mountains Health Center, who supports the idea.
Hospital administrators also described challenges their facilities face, including staffing and transportation.
Julie Windom, vice president of government relations for Atrium Health, said her company’s two urban hospitals in Macon and Rome are often fully occupied.
The emergency rooms face serious challenges and are almost always full, Windom said.
Although Navicent Macon is the second-largest hospital in Georgia (after Atlanta’s Grady Memorial) with more than 600 beds, it usually has to close 90 to 120 beds a day because of staffing shortages, Windom said.
The company is now building a freestanding emergency room in Chattooga County, she said.
Steve Whatley, former mayor of Cuthbert, said the rural Southwest Georgia community hopes to resurrect the town’s recently shuttered hospital.
The Cuthbert hospital’s closure in 2020 affected the entire community, but the loss of emergency services has been felt especially acutely, Whatley said.
“We have one fully staffed ambulance,” he said. “People have died in our county waiting on our ambulance.”
Randolph County and the surrounding counties need at least a freestanding emergency room, Whatley said. The community will apply for a $25 million federal loan to build an emergency room and five hospital beds to accompany it.
“The loss of the hospital was very hurtful,” Whatley said. “But the biggest loss to us was our emergency room.”
This story is available through a news partnership with Capitol Beat News Service, a project of the Georgia Press Educational Foundation.
ATLANTA – About six weeks after it launched, close to 10,000 Georgians have called the new 988 mental health hotline seeking support.
Rural Georgians, especially those in the southern part of the state, appear to be using the service in higher numbers than urban Georgians, officials with the state behavioral health agency said Thursday.
Designed to provide a mental health complement to existing emergency 911 services, the new 988 service launched in July.
Right now, Georgians who call 988 – which is open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year – are almost always routed to a counselor in the state.
Prior to the national 988 initiative, Georgia already had a mental health helpline called the Georgia Crisis and Access Line. Currently, Georgians can call either number and reach the same services.
In just the first 45 days of its operation, 37,561 Georgians called either 988 or the Georgia Crisis and Access Line for help with mental health or substance abuse. That’s almost 5,000 more calls than in the same period last year.
Calls to the new 988 number so far are being answered quickly, usually in under 10 seconds, officials said.
The new data shows that many counties in South Georgia are seeing high rates of use.
For example, there were 38.7 calls per 10,000 residents in Webster County in Southwest Georgia during the first month of the new service. That’s more than double the rate for metro Atlanta’s Fulton County.
“This is an area we continue to research,” said Ashley Fielding, an assistant commissioner with the state Department of Behavioral Health and Developmental Disabilities (DBHDD).
“What we do know is this tracks with a trend we’ve seen with [increasing] suicide rates in rural areas of Georgia,” she said.
Men have also been slightly more likely to use the hotline than women have so far, officials said. About 53.66% of the callers have been male, while only about 41.13% were female.
Young people are also reaching out to the hotlines for help.
Almost 10% of the hotline calls related to the mental health of someone who is under 18.
Overall, the largest proportion of callers came from the 25-34 sub-group, the DBHDD data showed.
The agency did not provide data about the language breakdown of callers but noted that the new 988 service can provide services in English and Spanish. Translation services for other languages are available as well.
The 988 phone call is designed to be the first in a series of potential steps to help someone in mental health crisis.
The trained counselor on the other end of the phone often can help calm the caller and refer them to outpatient services.
If additional help is needed, the counselor at the hotline can ask emergency first responders or a mobile-crisis team to travel to the person to help them on-site.
The counselor can also help arrange referral to a crisis stabilization unit or other health-care facility if the person needs additional in-patient treatment.
This story is available through a news partnership with Capitol Beat News Service, a project of the Georgia Press Educational Foundation.
ATLANTA – The Georgia Department of Education (DOE) Wednesday announced a pilot project to test a new method for evaluating teacher performance.
The new program will be called GaLEADS. It will be tried in a dozen Georgia school districts beginning in the 2023-2024 school year. Districts will be able to apply to participate in the pilot beginning Thursday.
“I am fully committed to developing a teacher evaluation model that treats teachers as professionals and helps them succeed throughout their careers, to the benefit of students – rather than a punitive ‘gotcha’ system,” said State School Superintendent Richard Woods.
“This pilot is an opportunity for proof of concept and will allow us to work with school districts throughout the state to create an evaluation system that’s designed for teacher growth.”
The DOE recently published a report exploring the reasons for teacher burnout in Georgia. Teachers said they face unrealistic performance expectations, especially given the learning disruption caused by the COVID pandemic.
“Coming out of the pandemic, the desire to ‘return to normal’ has also come with an unrealistic expectation … without giving teachers the time, support, resources, and compassion to meet students at their current level,” the report said.
“PAGE is encouraged by the announced teacher evaluation pilot,” said Margaret Ciccarelli, director of legislative services for the organization.
Data from a 2021 statewide survey indicated that 45% of educators felt supervisor feedback under the current system was not helpful to their instructional practices, Ciccarelli said.
“A more effective Georgia educator evaluation system will better serve students by supporting teachers at every stage of their career, recognizing that the coaching needs of beginning teachers differ from the needs of skilled veteran educators,” she said.
Lisa Morgan, president of the Georgia Association of Educators, called for increased teacher involvement in revamping the state’s teacher-evaluation program.
“Classroom teachers are the experts and must be the principal voices speaking to the necessary supports available for themselves and their colleagues,” she said. “We look forward to working with the department to ensure that current classroom educators are involved throughout the process.”
Searcy hit back at Wednesday’s announcement about the new teacher-evaluation program, calling it an election gimmick with questionable timing.
“Why is the current state superintendent, who has been in office for almost eight years, deciding that now, 69 days before the election, he wants to make teacher evaluations a priority?” Searcy asked. “This has been a concern for teachers for at least eight years.”
Searcy said teachers should be involved in revamping the teacher-evaluation process.
“Educators, students, and parents deserve a state school superintendent who is a collaborator and who seeks the feedback of teachers,” she said.
This story is available through a news partnership with Capitol Beat News Service, a project of the Georgia Press Educational Foundation.
