Duh, yeah...flyover country already doing this for a while now. Guess what? Nothing happened. People are living.
Flyover country....For the first months of the pandemic, the mayor of La Grande, Oregon, governed a city whose residents regarded COVID-19 as somebody else’s problem; something for big cities to worry about.
Then, suddenly, it was La Grande’s problem.
"They got used to the belief that the virus wasn't going to get us here. Even though I wore a mask, I was very relaxed about this whole thing," Mayor Stephen Clements told OPB in June, shortly after over a hundred COVID-19 cases in his county were linked to a church service. La Grande is in the rural Northeast corner of Oregon, hours from the nearest major metropolitan center.
“There’s this belief that Eastern Oregon is just people living isolated at the end of a long dirt road,” said Tveit, who is also CEO of the Lake County Health District, which serves one of Oregon’s most remote and least populous regions. “It’s a shame that people have that view, because it’s not true.”