> And, yes, if a rural person is traveling to an urban area, they would have to abide by the same rules. Same as an urban person traveling to a rural area should be able to relax some of the restrictions they had to deal with.

Isn’t this precisely what organically happened? Again, there were no federal agents armed with guns and pepper spray roaming the nation, enforcing Covid compliance. Rural bars, restaurants, stores pretty much all remained open the whole pandemic minus the couple of weeks where we weren’t sure if it was thousands or millions of people who would die.

People were “forced” to wear masks, which again, in practice, meant that once you got a certain number of miles away from an urban center there was no enforcement.

Plenty of Americans never got vaccinated. Their travel was restricted. Fair trade off all things considered. Urban people shouldn’t be forced to eat (i.e. live) where rural people shit (i.e. gallivant around as a disease vector).

> Yet some of those controls affected the livelihood of many people in areas of the country that are often poorer than those in dense urban areas.

This is very bad faith. The rural poor were completely unaffected by Covid measures. I traveled to Kentucky throughout Covid for hiking and pretty much never saw a mask. The rural poor also were unaffected by travel restrictions because the rural poor do not travel.

I swear the only acceptable policy for some people would have been no policy at all. Any active policy would have eroded “trust in institutions”.

Dead people don’t buy products either.