SC’s and NC’s governors have different approaches to masks. One shows real leadership

On Tuesday the state of South Carolina reported a new daily record for coronavirus infections—1,700. Statewide hospitalizations for COVID-19 jumped to over 1,000 for the first time since the pandemic began. Since April, South Carolina has gone from being one of the least infected states in the southeast to a virtual tie with Florida for the most infections per 100,000 population. By any measure, South Carolina is spiking.

And yet, here in Charleston County, where I live, the wearing of masks has been remarkably unfashionable. For months now I have driven into the city for supplies and services, where I see a majority of maskless folk wandering the narrow historic streets. I am often the only masked pumper at the gas station, or one of a handful of masked shoppers at the drug store or liquor store. (That’s not to say there is no refuge. I have become a devout patron of Costco partly because they require masks of everyone).

Like many South Carolinians, my family has one foot in the mountains of western North Carolina, to which we flee every summer when the Lowcountry becomes unreasonably hot and buggy. The difference in the masked culture between the two is striking. Every single customer and every employee in my local North Carolina Harris Teeter was masked on my most recent visit. All the clerks in my liquor store stood behind plexiglass shields wearing masks.

That’s not to say that North Carolina hasn’t struggled with the pandemic as well. To stick with this past Tuesday, though, the same day that South Carolina reported the 1,700 cases and the 1,000-plus hospitalizations, North Carolina—with a population twice that of its southerly neighbor—reported 1,186 new cases and 908 hospitalizations. On the testing front, a 5% positive rate is now considered desirable. In North Carolina that number is currently 9%, while in South Carolina it is 19%.

Is it possible that the attitude of a state’s leadership toward the mitigation of COVID-19 actually makes a difference? If so, the two state’s leaders couldn’t be more different in their approaches. North Carolina’s Roy Cooper, a Democrat, has been waving the yellow caution flag on this pandemic for a while now. It was largely the issue of mask wearing and social distancing requirements for the Republican National Convention that caused President Trump to walk away from Charlotte in a huff a couple of weeks ago. (Ironically, Jacksonville, Fla., where he chose to relocate the confab, just passed a mandatory mask ordinance).

Gov. Cooper’s own statewide mandatory mask decree went into effect last Friday. Despite a high approval rating for his handling of the COVID crisis (or perhaps because of it), his upcoming opponent, Lt. Gov. Dan Forest, actually sued the governor for overstepping his executive powers by enforcing measures aimed at tamping down the virus. And three North Carolina sheriffs said they would refuse to enforce it. As Dave Barry would say: “I am not making this up.”

Down the road in South Carolina, Gov. Henry McMaster, a Republican and devout disciple of President Trump, refuses to issue a statewide mask mandate, saying that to do so would be “ineffective, impractical, and unenforceable”—sort of like, say, outlawing the possession of marijuana (which is illegal in South Carolina). To be fair to McMaster, he has lately taken to wearing masks in public and is all but begging South Carolinians to do likewise. Also, Charleston, the state’s new COVID hotspot, just passed its own mask mandate, effective yesterday (Wednesday), following Greenville, the previous hotspot. So there is progress in spite of the governor.

When the history of the horrific COVID-19 Pandemic is sorted out in years to come, the single hardest part for future generations to understand is likely to be the masks. How did they become such a volatile symbol of partisan politics, a line in the sand for the culture wars? How did a simple, commonsense tool — one that has been used since the Middle Ages to combat plagues — become a test of loyalty to a president who, for reasons increasingly known only to him, simply refuses to wear one?

Which brings us to the real point here. It’s not about whether a mask mandate is enforceable, or impractical or, as I have even seen on Twitter, “Maoist.” It’s about messaging and trying to model behavior that medical science tells us is likely to save lives. It’s about leadership.

This story was originally published July 1, 2020 at 1:44 PM.