Gov. Brian Kemp plans to lift Georgia's statewide stay-at-home order for most residents on Friday

• Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp plans to lift the state's shelter-in-place order for the vast majority of the state's residents at midnight tonight, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported.
• The state's stay-at-home will expire for most Georgia residents on May 1, while requiring the elderly and "medically fragile" to shelter in place through June 12.

• Kemp already allowed a slew of business establishments including hair and nail salons, bowling alleys, and gyms to reopen on April 24, followed by restaurants and movie theaters this past Monday.

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Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp plans to lift the state's shelter-in-place order for the vast majority of the state's residents at midnight tonight, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported.

The state's stay-at-home will expire for most residents on May 1, while requiring the elderly and "medically fragile" to shelter in place through June 12.

"Tonight at 11:59 PM, the statewide shelter-in-place order for most Georgians will expire," Kemp said in a video announcing the decision. "However, moving forward, I'm urging Georgians to continue to stay home whenever possible."

As of Thursday, Georgia reported over 26,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19, including 779 new cases on Wednesday, over 5,000 hospitalizations, and 1,120 deaths from the disease.

While most governors are taking a gradual approach to steadily re-open their states, Kemp is going much further. He allowed a slew of business establishments including hair and nail salons, bowling alleys, gyms, and massage-therapy centers to reopen on April 24, followed by restaurants and movie theaters this past Monday.

Kemp said businesses must follow "minimum basic operations" of safety, including "screening workers for fever and respiratory illness, enhancing workplace sanitation, wearing gloves and masks if appropriate, separating workspaces by at least 6 feet, and teleworking where at all possible, and implementing staggered shifts."

But given the sheer number of business establishments under the order, it's unclear how the state plans to enforce those guidelines across the board, especially in places like hair and nail salons that necessarily involve people being within 6 feet and touching each other.

The governor and his top public health officials are also encouraging residents to wear masks in retail stores or other places where they'll be in close proximity to others.

Despite sharp criticism from elected officials on both sides of the aisle that Georgia is moving to re-open too fast, Kemp argued in his interview with the Journal-Constitution that loosening restrictions for the non-elderly population makes sense because almost half of the coronavirus deaths in the state are linked to nursing homes and other long-term care facilities.

Kemp told the Journal-Constitutional that he believes the state's approach so far "has worked," adding, "It's given us time to build our hospital infrastructure capacity, get ventilators and ramp up testing. That's what really drove our decision."

But public health experts, other Georgia elected officials, and even President Donald Trump have warned that Georgia may be moving too fast to re-open, and could even risk spreading the virus further and undoing the progress the previous restrictions helped the state achieve.

"Reopening the state and relaxing social-distancing measures now is irresponsible and could even be deadly," Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms wrote in a Thursday op-ed in The Atlantic. "Our hospitals may not be stretched to capacity, but that does not mean we should work to fill the vacant beds. I strongly believe that our health-care system is not overwhelmed because we have been socially distancing."

Trump has, at times, strongly encouraged states to work to lift their stay-at-home orders and allow businesses to re-open to boost the economy. But even he openly criticized Kemp for his decision to allow some businesses to re-open before Georgia had seen consistently declining cases and hospitalization, per the re-opening guidelines set by his administration.

"I (or [Vice President Mike Pence]) never gave Governor Brian Kemp an OK on those few businesses outside of the Guidelines. FAKE NEWS! Spas, beauty salons, tattoo parlors, & barber shops should take a little slower path, but I told the Governor to do what is right for the great people of Georgia (& USA)!," Trump tweeted on April 24.