Real Alpha
Try Pro free

Pod Save America · 3 min · Oct 23, 2026

Why Bottoms says Atlanta's COVID response followed data

Keisha Lance Bottoms says her team relied on health data and expert advice when making COVID decisions. She credits that approach with helping Atlanta fare better on deaths than many cities.

Keisha Lance Bottoms

Keisha Lance Bottoms is a former mayor of Atlanta and Democratic nominee for Georgia governor.

Steered Atlanta through the pandemic and secured major affordable-housing investments as its 60th mayor.

About this segment

Keisha Lance Bottoms says her team relied on health data and expert advice when making COVID decisions. She credits that approach with helping Atlanta fare better on deaths than many cities.

From “Trump Blasts FAKE POLLS As His Approval Rating PLUMMETS”, Oct 23, 2026. Watch the full episode

“We were making decisions based on what the science was telling us.”
Keisha Lance Bottomsat 1:05:26 · Pod Save America1:05:26

Takeaways

  1. Bottoms says decisions were based on infection and death numbers.
  2. She says an Emory infectious-disease expert advised her team.
  3. She says business, university and hospital leaders helped shape decisions.

In this episode

Full episode
  1. 6:34Why Pfeiffer thinks Trump's core coalition is weakening8:24
  2. 20:46Why Pfeiffer says fake polls can reshape primaries5:32

  3. 1:04:32Why Bottoms says Atlanta's COVID response followed data3:07

  4. 3 more moments in the full episode
Up next · TRIGGERnometryWhy Tony Smith says arrivals need longer screening3:47

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

  1. 1:04:45

    But it's interesting that you bring up that period of time because a lot of the attacks against you are around the response to COVID and about efforts to protect people during that time, the difficult decisions that leaders were making. And I sometimes feel as though a lot of people, they want to hold Democrats responsible for the. trauma, and the hard choices that we were all making, like Democrats are mommy and you're mad at mommy for doing the thing that was meant to keep us safe.

  2. 1:05:19

    Do you know what I'm saying? Yeah. And if you think back, and again, people with a lot of money had the ability to try and erase history and rewrite history. If you remember when Georgia opened up very early, we were the first state to reopen. Even Donald Trump was upset at that time that the state had opened up so quickly. We were making decisions based on what the science was telling us. Carlos Del Rio, who was an infectious disease control expert at Emory University, was on speed dial for us.

  3. 1:05:51

    And it was all about data and metrics. If our numbers were at a certain point, we'd make certain decisions. So it was never emotional. It was never personal. It was how many people are dying, how many people are infected. At that time, we didn't have vaccines. And Atlanta fared better than most cities, just in terms of the number of deaths that we had. And I know it was because we were driven by the science.

  4. 1:06:18

    But also, we had the support at that time of our business community. There were corporate leaders, Fortune 500 CEOs who were helping us make those decisions, university leaders, hospital leaders. So it was never in a vacuum. And even when we talk about the crime numbers at that time, I remember in 2020 preparing March of 2020 to get my state of the city address. And I came across a draft of that speech that got pulled down because we had to shut everything down.

  5. 1:06:54

    I was touting how our crime numbers were dropping across the city because we were on this trend seeing our numbers drop in all the right areas. And then 2020 came, the pandemic, the protests of the summer of 2020, and we weren't spared from what the rest of the country experienced at that time. So now you're running for governor. What do you see as the biggest challenge facing Georgia right now that the governor would be in a position to address?