The governor of Georgia seems to have been unaware until this week that the novel coronavirus can be spread by people without symptoms, something that is by no means new information.

Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R) in a news conference on Wednesday, in which he announced a stay-at-home order for the state, pointed out that the COVID-19 coronavirus is "transmitting before people see signs" while wrongly suggesting this was not known until very recently.

"We've been telling people from directives from the CDC for weeks now that if you start feeling bad, stay home," Kemp said. "Those individuals could have been infecting people before they ever felt bad. Well, we didn't know that until the last 24 hours."

In fact, health officials have been warning about this for quite some time. The Washington Post notes, for example, that Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said as far back as Jan. 31 that it was at first "not clear whether an asymptomatic person could transmit it to someone while they were asymptomatic," but "now, we know from a recent report from Germany that that is absolutely the case."

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