Same as how national stats can overpower trends in specific states, large cities in states can overpower trends in other areas.
You can look at data on a county level on the New York Times.
Missouri has two counties that over the last 2 weeks, where cases are up over 2000%. But these are small counties, so they went from 0 cases per day to 10, 15, 20, 30+ cases a day. For those counties, it is definitely a surge. Dozens of counties are at 100% or higher case increase. But two that aren't... St. Louis and Kansas City.
Same with Arkansas. 25 counties at 100% increases the two highest at over 1250%, but Little Rock and Fort Smith's counties are not.
Mississippi and Alabama don't look nearly as bad as those, but they have some counties that are at +1000% or +500%