The main thing my post was responding to was the implication of inappropriate motives or personality traits for her decision making, and the second thing was to emphasize her humility in her judgments. My point was that I think it's fine to criticize her decisions but not her motives.[/size][/color]
Because SCC is an outlier in some respects, you believe she must feel she "knows better." I do not think she "knows" with any certainty what is best, for her county or any other. She is just making her best judgments for her own county based on the data and experience and circumstances of her own county. I do not think she "knows," or thinks she knows, better than any other county what's best for them. One thing I absolutely do not want her to do is to do what everyone else is doing simply because they are doing it, even though she thinks it is wrong for SCC. If you're an outlier it's certainly worth understanding why, and I'm sure she is in frequent communication with the other local public health officers and knows why they are making the decisions they are. But she is doing what she thinks is best for SCC. If that is the same as "knowing better than everyone else," then I suppose we are in agreement except for terminology. Maybe we could agree on, she thinks she knows better than everyone else what is best for SCC. That is exactly what we should want her to think, isn't it?
I would point out though, that there is likely a causal relationship between having good numbers and having the tightest restrictions. And from her public comments, I think the reason she is maintaining tight restrictions longer than similar counties is that what she learned from what happened when she loosened the restrictions in the summer is that the infection rate can shoot up very quickly, and once up, can take a very long time to bring back down. I suspect she views what happened over the summer as something that she doesn't want to repeat, and is willing open up more slowly as a result. Certainly reasonable people could differ on that. Keep in mind that there mostly is no right or wrong, there is simply a complex set of tradeoffs that different people can come to different conclusions about.
Because SCC is an outlier in some respects, you believe she must feel she "knows better." I do not think she "knows" with any certainty what is best, for her county or any other. She is just making her best judgments for her own county based on the data and experience and circumstances of her own county. I do not think she "knows," or thinks she knows, better than any other county what's best for them. One thing I absolutely do not want her to do is to do what everyone else is doing simply because they are doing it, even though she thinks it is wrong for SCC. If you're an outlier it's certainly worth understanding why, and I'm sure she is in frequent communication with the other local public health officers and knows why they are making the decisions they are. But she is doing what she thinks is best for SCC. If that is the same as "knowing better than everyone else," then I suppose we are in agreement except for terminology. Maybe we could agree on, she thinks she knows better than everyone else what is best for SCC. That is exactly what we should want her to think, isn't it?
I would point out though, that there is likely a causal relationship between having good numbers and having the tightest restrictions. And from her public comments, I think the reason she is maintaining tight restrictions longer than similar counties is that what she learned from what happened when she loosened the restrictions in the summer is that the infection rate can shoot up very quickly, and once up, can take a very long time to bring back down. I suspect she views what happened over the summer as something that she doesn't want to repeat, and is willing open up more slowly as a result. Certainly reasonable people could differ on that. Keep in mind that there mostly is no right or wrong, there is simply a complex set of tradeoffs that different people can come to different conclusions about.