I think that partly has to do with CDC overreach. For instance, CDC mandated an eviction moratorium. You can agree with the moratorium, but is that really something the Center for Disease Control should be involved in?

Also, some nursing schools have seen record applications, suggesting people actually want to help. You provide no scale for that 250 public health officials.

https://son.rochester.edu/newsroom/2020/record-breaking-enro...

To be clear, Trump gave them that power through executive order: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/trump-gives-cdc...

It would be interesting to know why the CDC was chosen as the mechanism for this policy.

Was it Trump's (or any other president's) power to delegate away?

I listened to that TAL recently and how they were treated was outrageous.

But NPR reveals some bias in a couple of instances. For example, they describe how the health officials had to rescind the order prohibiting people from being on the beach because it was impossible to enforce. An unasked question is whether an order to close beaches might have engendered skepticism of public health officials' judgement.

It's okay to be skeptical. I think we look at how officieals closed the beaches, know now that outdoor spread is rare, and say that it was an obvious misjudgment. But this ignores the practical reality of what happens when the beaches are open, which is this sort of thing:

> “We don’t want people from higher-impact counties who maybe haven’t done as good a job as Santa Cruz has to come in and spread that virus,” Hart said. “In ordinary times, we love people coming in, right? Our economy is driven on tourism and agriculture. We want people here during normal times. This is not a normal time. So we don’t want those folks here from Sacramento or other areas,” Hart said.

> The law breakers have been all ages, but a few whom deputies caught were teens who gathered in a car near the beach and passed around a bong, Hart said.

https://santacruzlocal.org/2020/04/09/authorities-close-sant...

Maybe the officials should have left the beaches open and tried a message like "it's okay for Santa Cruz locals to go to the beach, but this thing spreads through the air in enclosed spaces, so please everyone take your own cars or drive with the windows open, and we don't want people from outside communities coming here and spreading the virus."

I believe health officials were generally operating in good faith. That doesn't mean they were always correct. I'd like to ask what they were thinking when they closed the beaches, but I don't think it was a simple calculation.

I think the calculation was wrong. It's not a question of whether being outdoors was safe or not, it's about whether or not it's safer than gathering indoors. Instead, they naively thought that closing outdoor gathering spaces would leave people with no option besides privately quarantining rather than--predictably--gathering indoors away from regulators. And while we didn't know precisely how much safer it was to be outdoors than indoors, we certainly knew that it was quite a lot safer.

Anyone who paid attention in high school biology knew that the beach is close to the safest place you could be during a respiratory pandemic. The literature on fresh air and sunshine improving tuberculosis outcomes is a century old.

>> Instead of respect, we got demonization of half the country.

> I don't think this is entirely fair. I'd invite you to at least listen to what local public health officials were dealing with...

~Half the country was ~demonized (or more importantly: perceive themselves to have been demonized), or they were not. Whether it was ~justified is certainly relevant, but it has no bearing on the fact, and more importantly: the second order behavior that will result from that fact, perhaps for several years.

The CDC guidelines seem to have been written in a way that is mindful of this complexity, but it seems they were not followed for some reason (do you point your critical eye at these shortcomings, and with the same enthusiasm and scrutiny as you point it at the members of your outgroup?), which will likely have some negative consequences, most of which we will be completely oblivious to (not to worry though: we'll imagine plenty of others, and consider these imaginations to be reality).

> A significant and vocal portion of the country thinks its okay to bully and berate officials.

And whose fault is that, comprehensively and accurately? Is the suboptimal behavior of black people in inner city ghettos purely their fault? Should they just work hard and pull themselves up by their bootstraps? INB4: That's different! That's whataboutism! That is not comparable! Mother nature decides how reality unfolds, based on recursive causality far beyond our ability even conceive of, let alone measure and understand. You and I can only decide (to whatever degree we have free will) how we shall conceptualize the situation, and then how we shall act. One can perceive it simply, with a high level of confidence in the correctness of one's biased guesses, or one can exert effort to perceive it more accurately, closer to how it really is: unknown. Just as the people in the article have chosen a way to perceive reality (my guess: low complexity, high confidence), so too do you and I choose a way - and based on such choices, reality unfolds according to the laws of the universe - our respective agreement with how this is, is not a requirement.

> Since the beginning of the pandemic, nearly 250 public health officials working in communities all over the US have left their jobs, many because of threats and political pushback.

Or, “I’ll do the job when it’s easy but when it’s hard, gosh I’m trying my best why won’t people just do what I say.”

Or, "I'll do the job when it's underpaid, underappreciated and hard, but when people start threatening myself and my family, I'll quit."