Georgia’s recent spike in new COVID-19 cases likely indicates the virus is spreading and cannot be solely attributed to a surge in testing, a prominent public health expert said Thursday.

“It’s not ‘either or.’ I think it’s probably both,” Dr. Carlos del Rio, chairman of the global health department at Emory University and the dean overseeing physicians at Grady Memorial Hospital, said during a press conference with Dr. Colleen Kraft, director of Emory’s Clinical Virology Research Laboratory.

More diagnostic testing was certainly turning up more new cases, but the partial end of the state’s shelter-in-place order, allowing most Georgians to move about, is a key reason behind a 26% percent rise in cases between the weeks of May 11 and May 18, Del Rio said.