A Georgia National Guardsman cleans a resident's room at the Condor Health Lafayette nursing home in Fayetteville.

ATLANTA — On par with the rest of the country, Georgia is seeing a spike in COVID-19 cases while the state’s testing rate has dropped significantly.

Although state officials announced the first round of COVID-19 vaccines will be doled out to some health care workers and nursing home residents in the coming week, the initial distributions will not be nearly enough to reduce community spread of the virus.

In the most recent report dated Dec. 6, the White House Coronavirus Task Force has Georgia still in the “red zone” for new cases and test positivity with 79% of counties showing moderate to high levels of community transmission.

“Georgia has seen an increase in new cases, an increase in test positivity, an increase in hospitalizations and deaths, indicating ongoing aggressive community spread,” the report says.

As of Dec. 10, the virus had sickened more than 462,000 Georgians and killed 9,123. Thursday marked the highest single-day case increase the state has ever seen — 6,062.

Health officials and medical workers have long suspected the winter months of 2020 would bring such a surge of cases, as weather grew colder and more Americans spent time indoors.

With the holiday season, small family gatherings have contributed to the severe increase of coronavirus cases.

“This surge is the most rapid increase in cases, the widest spread of intense transmission, with more than 2,000 counties in COVID-19 red zones, and the longest duration of rapid increase, now entering its eighth week, that we’ve experienced,” the report says.

According to the Department of Public Health from Dec. 1-7, the seven-day average of new reported cases increased 62% from the previous week; however, some of the increase can be attributed to decrease in testing and delay in case reporting during Thanksgiving.

While cases have increased, the state’s testing has decreased. According to the White House report, the state’s testing rate is down 43%. Georgia’s test positivity rate has increased 5% and now surpasses the national average.

The report urges state and local officials to immediately intervene to try to curb the wave of cases by instituting mask mandates, requiring social distancing, discouraging indoor gatherings outside of immediate family members and returning to aggressive testing of asymptomatic individuals.

In a press conference Tuesday, Kemp stood behind the state’s reopening strategy, saying Georgia has been able to “successfully balance both lives and livelihoods” while touting Georgia’s economic rebound.

“This year has brought unimaginable hardship. But it is my belief that we have lost too many loved ones, too many friends and neighbors to give into this virus. Too many businesses have gone under and too many families have literally lost it all,” the Republican governor said. “We cannot give up now. We all must do our part, so that the sacrifices that everyone has made will not be done in vain. This long nationwide nightmare will end.”

Georgia’s high rates of test positivity and hospitalizations are still a concern Kemp said. According to Georgia Emergency Management Agency data, more than 85% of general inpatient and intensive care unit beds are filled statewide. Kemp made a plea to Peach State residents to stay away from gatherings.

John Haupert, chief executive officer of Grady Health System, said the hospital system is “extremely concerned” as Georgians start traveling for the holidays.

“With each passing day, COVID-19 hospitalizations in our city and state go up. They are rising to a level that will soon jeopardize our collective ability to care for patients with other serious illnesses,” he said in a statement. “We’re facing a COVID wave that was already underway and now intensified by the post-Thanksgiving cases we knew would come. We are bracing for the worst, as the holiday-related case numbers are not expected to peak for several more days.”

Kemp said Tuesday new executive orders mandating additional restrictions aren’t off the table, but if Georgians heed public health guidance, he won’t have to consider additional mandates. He understands, he said, people are fatigued.

“This virus is up to all of us. When you look all over the country, everybody’s got all these different regulations and they’re shutting down here and they’re shutting down there. They’re in much worse shape than we are,” he said. “I’m not criticizing anybody else, I’m just saying the things that we have in place will work. We’ve seen them work in the past. Our regulations that we have in place right now are the same that they were when we were in some of our lowest numbers … We have got to get people to help be part of the solution, not part of the problem.”

Officials from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, based in Atlanta, pleaded with Americans to postpone travel plans. If individuals decide to travel, the agency encourages being tested and self-quarantining beforehand.

“Cases are rising and the safest thing to do is postpone holiday travel and stay home,” Dr. Cindy Friedman, chief of the CDC’s travelers health branch, said in a press briefing. “Travel volume was high over Thanksgiving and even if only a small percentage of those travelers were symptomatically infected, this can translate into hundreds of thousands of additional infections moving from one community to another.”