Well when our federal government basically screws the pooch it's up to individual states to work together to limit the spread. And since most of the state governments seem to not really care about the health of their citizens, it makes sense that there would be small groups of states that do. Honestly I assumed that if the outbreak got really bad the PNW would eventually secede from the union because the federal government wasn't providing much aid. But this is a lot better than that.
Yours is obviously just an analogy and I'm not making claims as far as the underlying argument, but we did used to have smoking and non-smoking sections in restaurants, airplanes, etc. Clearly that was reasonable enough to people to be the way things were done for a few decades. Sometimes an 80% solution that seems almost comically flawed ends up being useful.
You could easily smell the smoke coming out of the 'smoking section'.
This is kind of like that, but you could die.
I imagine it more like 3 people standing in the furthest corner from the person peeing because the lifeguard isn't enforcing any rules except "no one can leave the pool".
Or a restaurant with a smoking section. Right next to the non-smoking section.