It should be a given: Local elected leaders — whether in Pueblo or Aurora or Colorado Springs or anyplace else — are in a better position to contain COVID than are officials who are higher up and farther away. That’s even more the case when those distant officials are unelected bureaucrats.

After all, local officeholders are more answerable to their communities and more in touch with their sensibilities. They are in a better position to balance the many competing interests in their communities with the latest recommendations by public health experts for combating the coronavirus.

But try telling that to the federal judge who brought down his gavel this week on what arguably has been Colorado’s most independent-minded county amid the pandemic.

Douglas County’s newly created board of health had barely taken its place on the dais when U.S. District Judge John L. Kane on Tuesday cut short its first major public health order — the panel’s decision Oct. 9 to lift a mask mandate on students at Douglas County School District.

So, it’s masks back on, for now, in Colorado’s eighth-largest school district — where the kids have been left with a case of whiplash.

The fledgling health board’s order had allowed students and staff to seek exemptions from wearing masks on campus, and it limited quarantine regulations for students and staff. That order had reversed an order by the county’s previous public health authority, Tri-county Health Department, requiring masks for many students and staff. After more than a year of wrangling with Tri-county as the pandemic wore on, the Douglas County Commission finally severed its ties with the health agency and set up its own.

For those readers who haven’t been following the face-off — it gets even more complicated.

As reported in Tuesday’s Gazette, the district sued the county’s newly formed health department last week under the Americans with Disabilities Act. They brought the action on behalf of several families whose children have disabilities, including cystic fibrosis and Type 1 Diabetes.

That makes them more susceptible to severe illness from COVID-19, the parents and the district contended in court. Those families claimed their children’s rights were being violated by the mask exemption and that the new health department violated the federal act.

Kane reinstated the district’s previous mask mandate that had been ordered by its now-former public health authority. The judge declared that the upstart health department’s action put students with disabilities in harm’s way.

“I find the risk of irreparable harm to Plaintiffs is significant and they have sufficiently demonstrated that the Public Health Order denies Student Plaintiffs reasonable accommodations in the form of science-backed masking and quarantine requirements,” the judge wrote in his ruling.

He issued a 14-day restraining order on the new health department’s public health order.

It’s a disappointing turn of events. Not necessarily because Douglas County school kids once again will be told to don masks; that’s open to debate. What’s disappointing is that a federal court would intervene in an inherently local affair. You don’t have to take sides between the new local health department and the local school district to appreciate that these differences should be resolved at the local level.

Now that Adams County has pulled out of Tri-county Health, as well, it’s even clearer that it was a stretch to let the agency dictate what was best for any one of its county members. Similarly, the federal court’s intervention this week was unwarranted, and the decision by the district to seek that intervention was regrettable.

As we observed here after the last development in this saga, there’s not much of a statewide consensus in Colorado about measures to tackle COVID. A survey conducted in August by Louisville-based political polling firm Magellan Strategies found 50% of Colorado parents opposed mask mandates for public-school students in grades K-12. Yet, 48% of the parents polled supported requiring masks.

“The state is … split down the middle over whether kids should be wearing masks to schools,” Magellan’s Ryan Winger told The Gazette at the time.

Likewise, there’s no statewide consensus on Douglas County letting residents and students lower their masks. On the other hand, the move by most indicators enjoyed broad support locally, which is why it’s all the more essential that local authorities call the shots.

Local governments are in a better position to gauge such sensibilities and balance interests when making decisions. They are likelier to take input from the general public, locally, and not just from a public health establishment that is far from Main Street.

Such wisdom is on hold for the moment, unfortunately. It could remain on hold indefinitely pending the court battle’s outcome. Meanwhile, Douglas County’s students will keep playing Simon says.