4. Tennessee
Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee has made his opinion about the task force’s recommendations very clear. Deborah Birx, MD, of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, said during her visit to the Volunteer State on July 27 that: “We’ve done a lot of modeling and we have found that if you all wear a mask—all Tennesseans—in every public area and you stop going to bars, and in fact close the bars, and limit your indoor dining, that we can have as big of an impact on decreasing new cases as we had with sheltering in place.”
Lee’s response was: “I’ve said from the very beginning of this pandemic that there’s nothing off the table. I’ve also said that we are not going to close the economy back down, and we are not going to. But I appreciate their recommendations and we take them seriously.”
Apparently, Bill Lee didn’t want to implement a statewide mask mandate because he assumed that citizens wouldn’t comply, but he did give mayors the permission to emit a mask mandate within their domain, according to The Center Square. Moreover, bars are still open in several parts of the state, even though on July 29, the Knox County Board of Health voted that the bars should be closed in the county.
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