I am very proud to say that my particular part of North Carolina decided unilaterally that we were not going to play the Covid game handed down by the State legislature. The sheriff, who is an elected official, realizing that the people of the county are predominantly opposed to all of the mandates that were passed down without our local approval or even review, publicly announced that he and his deputies would not be enforcing any orders passed down by the Governor's office or any other State legislation.
We were told it was going to be a death sentence for us and that our hospitals would be overflowing and that the dead would be piling up in the streets and that we were going to be killing all of our elderly residents.
NONE OF THIS HAPPENED
You will see almost no one wearing a mask in my county in North Carolina and while a lot of it has become a point of pride, we are living proof that the masks might not have been necessary to begin with, and perhaps they don't actually accomplish anything. I am not going to look into the "science" behind any of it because depending on what you want the end result you desire, you can find studies that "prove" both stances.
So in North Carolina at the moment, there are some counties and cities that have mask mandates indoors only, some areas that have indoors only for the non-vaccinated, some that have indoor mandates for masks for vaccinated and non-vaccinated, others that have it for you if you are even OUTDOORS, and then there are ones like mine that have no mandates at all.
In North Carolina, there is a divide between opinions on masks as well as vaccines and lo' and behold, it is almost exclusively down party lines. How do you explain that one?
Conservative parts of the state, such as the one I live in is on one side and the metro areas such as Raleigh and Charlotte are on the other. Whether or not the people in the metro areas seem to think that masks actually do anything or not doesn't really seem to be an issue anymore: It has become a statement of what kind of person you are politically.
Since I am quite happy to remain in my conservative part of the state, I really don't have a problem with them keeping their mask opinions in the cities that they live in. Us "country bumpkins" don't really want to go to the cities anyway and those folks would be really out of place over here in our areas as well. It is a shame that it is like this, but I can assure you that it is definitely like this.
In the meantime I am very happy that the place I live appears to have a near unanimous opinion that we, as members of the community that actually live and work here, should have the final say in how it is that we choose to live our lives and for now, that consists of rejecting all orders passed down by the State government who don't even have representation in this part of the state. Most of North Carolina is conservative geographically speaking, but like a lot of states, this all changes once you get into the more populated areas.
I think this can be said for the rest of the United States as well with a few exceptions like Florida and Texas. How this came to be would be something that someone could write a dissertation on and would be something I would be very interested in reading since it does seem to be a near nationwide phenomenon.
src
not from NC, but it may as well be
In the mean time, I will not wear a face-diaper and neither will anyone else that I know. The only people you ever see wearing masks in this city are medical professionals who are at that time in the hospital so it is probably required. I do know several nurses though and as soon as they leave the building, the mask comes off and stays off for the rest of their day.
If you are a pro-mask person, I don't think less of you. You do you. I do take great offense and will resist if you or anyone else tries to tell me what I am supposed to do with my own life. I will not comply and thankfully all of Craven county (where I live) feels the same way.
People can quote all of the stats they want about masks, social distancing, etc that they want but here where I live, I don't know anyone who even knows anyone in our area that has died from Covid. Yet we are told that by our belligerent resistance to doing what our masters in Raleigh tell us to do, that we are going to kill everyone. Sorry / not sorry... but i'm gonna go ahead and call BS on that.