ASU to continue modeling work despite health department instructions to ‘pause’

Arizona State University will continue to provide COVID-19 models to the public despite instructions from the Arizona Department of Health Services to “pause” the work, the university confirmed.

A tweet from U.S. Sen. Kyrsten Sinema on Wednesday afternoon said that she was grateful the work would continue.

Sinema said the decision to “disregard the science that should be the basis of Arizona public health policies — and the White House’s guidelines for re-opening — is concerning and disappointing.”

Sinema said she intends to rely on the models’ findings and conclusions in her work.

ASU, in a statement to The Republic, confirmed it will be continuing the modeling work.

“Moving forward, ASU will continue to perform its COVID-19 research, and will make these updates publicly available during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic,” ASU said.

In the statement, ASU said it, along

with the University of Arizona, was contacted by the state health department in April to form a working group on modeling that would provide updates on COVID-19 data and economic impact assessments.

“ASU’s was one of several public health models ADHS used for guidance on its public health decisions,” ASU said.

The future role of the UA researchers, who had been involved in the project, was not immediately clear.

ASU’s confirmed commitment to public modeling comes after the health department on Monday emailed about two dozen university researchers who were involved in the working group, the day Gov. Doug Ducey announced plans to begin reopening certain businesses in the coming days, like salons and restaurants.

The email, from S. Robert Bailey, DHS bureau chief of public health statistics, said that health department leadership had asked the team to “pause” all work on projections and modeling. The department also would end access to special data sets the modeling team had been using for their efforts, Bailey said.

The state is instead relying on a model from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. This model has not been released to the public.

The universities’ model, as of late April, had shown that reopening at the end of May was the only scenario that didn’t dramatically increase COVID-19 cases.

In late April, Tim Lant, a mathematical epidemiologist at ASU, said the model showed five different scenarios for how the disease could progress in Arizona, depending on how social distancing efforts were relaxed.

The slowest curve, based on if the state reopens at the end of May, is “the only one that doesn’t put me immediately back on an exponential growth curve,” Lant said in April. That’s because transmission rates would be lowest at that time, he said.

“I can say, scientifically, no, it’s not safe to reopen unless you’re planning on, you know, shutting down again after a couple of weeks, and we can help figure out what the appropriate amount of time is to stay open before we shut down,” he said.

Ducey spokesman Patrick Ptak said Wednesday the state was using multiple models earlier on, which often had “widely divergent” projections and changed constantly.

“We now have two months of on-the-ground data,” Ptak said. “We’ve been able to see which models are accurate — which match the actual facts and are most useful — and which are not.”

Ptak noted that ADHS Director Cara Christ, who is an infectious disease epidemiologist and public health expert, made the decision to pause the university modeling group “after reviewing all the data.”

The decision drew criticism from Democrats, including Sinema, other members of Congress and state lawmakers.