Science and politics are not good roommates.
I am the one who posted about my buddy at Lowes. It was not the corporation, but the individual store. So that was blown out of context. Sorry for the confusion. It may be a subjective result, but to me significant. I know this mask thing is based not only on science but politics and feelings. I agree it is reasonable to have an opinion either way. Data indicates my area of the world is not a hotbed of covid. But, how is it possible no employees at a store had covid? No need to answer that because it will get political.
My son worked at a local Atlanta retail store (name intentionally not named) full time for the last few months. He was required to wear a mask. There was limited social distancing. Hundreds/thousands of customer interactions. He lives at home. As far as we know he did not get covid and pass it along to his family. Heck, as far as we know, my family may have already had covid and have antibodies. We did nothing extraordinary at home with respect to covid. He did not have to shower before coming into the house. No fumigation.
My experience. Not something off Facebook or the media.
I just want to figure a way to get kids back in school.
It isn't that hard to figure out how no employees at one store have been confirmed to have the virus. Fulton county is at about a 1.4% confirmed infection rate. Your area might be less than that, and you specifically said that it isn't a hotbed, so it might be significantly less than that. I'm not sure how many employees each Lowe's store has, but let's make an assumption of 100. That would mean statistically you would expect 1.4 confirmed cases at that store. However, the statistics are not evenly distributed. If the nursing home down the street had 25 confirmed cases amoung 80 residents and 20 employees, then those 25 are enough to cover the statistics for the nursing home and 15 Lowe's stores.
As to your son, I am glad that he hasn't been infected or sick. I'm not aware of anyone saying that if you work in retail you are guaranteed to be infected. As I said before, the confirmed infection rate in Fulton county is about 1.4%. that means that 98.6% of people have not been confirmed to have the virus. Recent reports say that actual infections are 10 times the confirmed infections. That still means that purely statistically you have an 86% chance of not having or having had the virus.
The confirmed rate where I live is around 0.5%. I know three people off the top of my head who had it. At a church I used to go to, four people have had it. (I only counted one of those in the three, because I don't know the others.). It isn't the case that walking into a store is going to guarantee that you get it. However, it isn't the case that the virus doesn't even exist, and that zero precautions should be taken to protect people either.