The spread of coronavirus across the American south has forced many Republican governors to choose: issue a mask mandate to try to force residents to wear them, as many other states and countries have done, or stick with Donald Trump’s more hands-off approach.
Trump shifted his position on Tuesday when he said at a press conference: “We’re asking everybody that when you are not able to socially distance, wear a mask, get a mask.”
It marked a reversal for a president who previously dismissed the effectiveness of masks, spread misinformation about their safety and has declined to wear one in most of his public appearances.
On Sunday during a Fox News interview, Trump said, without evidence, that “masks cause problems too”. On Monday he tweeted a picture of himself wearing a mask. But the gestures have fallen short of supporting mandates seeking to require Americans to wear masks.
Meanwhile, a growing number of southern Republican governors have begun to issue their own requirements for masks in public, as cases rise in their states, and despite political objections centered on notions of personal liberty.
The governor of Mississippi, Tate Reeves, is trying to chart a middle ground in his state, which voted convincingly for Trump in 2016. He has issued county-by-county mask mandates, avoiding a statewide order on the grounds Mississippians would not listen to such a dictate.
“I get frustrated because when I look back on March and April, the only thing anybody ever wanted to talk about in the press or among public health experts was ‘shelter in place, shelter in place, shelter in place’,” Reeves told the Guardian.
“If you didn’t do a shelter-in-place then you were evil and you weren’t trying to protect your people,” said Reeves. “Well, today now that we’re seeing significantly rising cases – in fact, three and four times more than we saw in March and April – nobody’s talking about a shelter-in-place. They just want a statewide mask mandate.”
But the shifting sands come months after public health authorities first recommended Americans wear masks in April.
“I believe in our state, if I said, ‘OK, everybody needs to wear a mask,’ invariably throughout the various regions of our state people would be saying, ‘Aww, he’s talking about them other people. He’s just throwing us in there for the heck of it,’” he said.
Nearly every Democratic-led state has issued a mask mandate, with 28 states now requiring face coverings in public. But the mixed, politicized messages about the importance of masks come at a critical juncture in the pandemic. Experts believe the death count will increase significantly in the coming weeks, as people already infected with Covid-19 become more ill.
At least 141,000 Americans have died from Covid-19, according to Johns Hopkins University. But a growing number of Republicans believe Covid-19 death tolls are inflated, recent polls have shown, despite public health experts warning they are likely to be an undercount.
Reeves said he has been in contact with top White House officials. He has recently met with Pete Gaynor, administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and has also been in contact with Dr Deborah Birx, the coordinator the White House’s coronavirus taskforce. He also has ties to the latest round of southern governors who have issued mask mandates. And Reeves dismissed the idea of attempting to beat the pandemic by achieving herd immunity, an approach favored by some conservative lawmakers.
But Raymond Scheppach, a former executive director of the National Governors Association, said multiple factors were pressuring Republicans not to take additional steps to curb the coronavirus.
“One is that ideologically they don’t like to use the full force of government,” Scheppach said. “And then you’ve got the Trump component on top of that, which clearly seems to be affecting Florida, Georgia, Arizona and so on.”
Scheppach said some Republican governors in hotspot states were trying to stay aligned with Trump. “He’s not pushing masks. So they’re to some extent trying to stay consistent and support him,” Scheppach said. “The only problem is, my read right now is Trump’s not in particularly good shape in terms of support in those states.”
Last week, the governor of deep-red Alabama issued a statewide mask order. Shortly after, the governor of reliably Republican Arkansas issued an order requiring masks in public. In Texas, Governor Greg Abbott reversed course after months of banning cities from issuing mandates and issued his own mandate across most counties.
Yet in Georgia, the Republican governor, Brian Kemp, is suing Atlanta to fight the mask mandate of the city’s Democratic mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms. In Florida, one of the biggest coronavirus hotspots in the world in terms of new daily case numbers, Governor Ron DeSantis last month said mask mandates don’t work.
“In the southern states, it seems – it’s too simple to call it red and blue – but in a lot of the red states it seems they’ve been against everything in this anti-pandemic ethos,” said Dr Howard Markel, a pandemic historian, pediatrician and professor at the University of Michigan’s medical school. Those states “have been more in the libertarian mode, and to me, that’s just plain irresponsible”.
Early in the pandemic, Markel and other epidemiologists did not call for a mask mandate because of severe shortages of masks for healthcare workers, and in part because some evidence of their effectiveness was weak. While there are still rolling shortages of personal protective equipment, at least partly because of the anemic federal response, informal masks for the public are now widely available, and studies have become more robust.
“The new data has changed my mind,” said Markel. “Not that I was totally against it, but it’s made me more likely to wear them and want others to wear them.”
However, Markel acknowledged the mask mandates were almost impossible to enforce. Police are “busy doing other things”, and business owners and employees often face irate customers when they try.
Reeves, the Mississippi governor, said: “I believe that in Mississippi the best way to get most people to comply with that directive is to ask them to do it, to mandate it in those counties that are most affected by the spread of the virus.” He added that it was important “to recognize that Hinds county – the county in which I currently reside, in the capital city – has significantly different issues than, say, Tishomingo county, up in the north-east corner of the state”.
A mask mandate is in effect for 23 of Mississippi’s 82 counties. Asked if there was a situation in which he would issue a statewide mask ban, Reeves instead pointed to the criteria his team used to issue a county mask mandate.
“The subjective data that we look at is: if you reach more than 200 cases over a 14-day period – raw data – or more than 500 per 100,000 residents over a 14-day period, then we put you on our watch list” for a mandate, Reeves said.
Mississippi’s caseload is already grinding down healthcare workers across the state. Dr LouAnn Woodward is vice-chancellor of the University of Mississippi medical center, the top executive of the state’s largest hospital and only academic medical center.
The intensive care unit at her hospital has overflowed with Covid-19 patients for weeks. A week ago, Woodward said she would only call for a mask mandate if she believed that’s “what it would take”.
“It’s mind-boggling to me that people have turned this into such an issue, with politics and everything else, where it’s really just a practical safety issue in the middle of a pandemic,” she said. “It’s really not that big a deal. Just wear a mask.”
