I've lived in small cow-towns like that, and people there live in this bubble where whatever is happening with "city folks" doesn't apply to them. They live with a sort of mild contempt or anyone from big cities and put them on a permanent pay-no-mind list, as if they don't exist. I guarantee if you walked into any shitkicker bar in, say, Cheyenne, Wyoming, on any day of the week over the summer while the virus was wreaking havoc all over the western U.S., you would've never guessed a pandemic was going on. Hicks, rednecks and cowboys crowding the bar counter and pool tables with no masks, hee-hawing and slapping each other's backs while they tell racist jokes and bitch about their wives over Pabst tall-boys and shots of Wild Turkey. And then that one asshole in the middle of the crowd thinks nothing of the fact that he drove into Denver a few days earlier to pick up some equipment at a wholesaler and figures the sore throat and cough he's been feeling since morning are from some bad chewing tobacco.
It's like any small, rural, isolated community that managed to stay virus-free for a long time. Everything's fine, until it isn't. Then before anyone realizes what's going on, half the neighborhood is sick. Gotta hand it to us city folks, at least we're now properly paranoid and neurotic and ready to pepper-spray any asshole who comes within ten feet of us.