ATLANTA — Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms said on MSNBC’s Morning Joe Wednesday that the city of Atlanta would implement a mandatory mask policy to fight the spread of COVID-19 today.
Once the mask order is made, Atlanta will join the cities of Savannah, East Point and Athens in bucking Gov. Brian Kemp’s executive order and mandating masks at the local level.
Kemp’s executive order technically forbids cities and counties from implementing any policies or mandates that are more aggressive than statewide mandates, but the governor has not yet fought the city’s who have created masking ordinances.
The move by Bottoms comes as she announced that she and members of her household have tested positive for COVID-19 and as Georgia has seen a sharp increase in new cases of coronavirus and hospitalizations.
“Our COVID numbers are going up in ways that I haven’t seen since the beginning of this pandemic,” Bottoms said in her appearance on Morning Joe.
