Former Arizona health director: Policy decisions conflict with virus modeling
May 7, 2020, 4:55 PM | Updated: 4:55 pm
PHOENIX — The former director of the Arizona Department of Health Services said Thursday he believes the state’s initial move to stop using researchers to model the coronavirus outbreak was made because of possible conflict with policy decisions.
“I don’t think they wanted any more results because they were afraid they weren’t going to support decisions they were going to make,” Will Humble told KTAR News 92.3 FM’s Gaydos and Chad.
On Wednesday, the state health department said it no longer needed researchers from state universities to predict the spread of COVID-19.
AZDHS reversed course Thursday, announcing its partnership with the university coronavirus modeling team was being extended.
This came after a health department spokesman said Wednesday the research team finished its work last month, right as the team’s leader, Dr. Timothy Lant of Arizona State University, had urged gradually reopening Arizona’s economy in late May.
Gov. Doug Ducey earlier this week announced plans to gradually open the state starting Friday with some retail operations. Limited dine-in at Arizona restaurants will begin Monday.
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The state’s “stay-at-home” order remains in effect until at least May 15.
“I think it’s pretty much that the results were inconvenient for the kinds of policy decisions they want to make,” Humble said.
Humble, who served as the AZDHS head from 2009 to 2015, said that Ducey’s decisions and the lack of a publicly available model that support reopening this early trouble him.
He believes the lack of transparency isn’t building trust between citizens who have been seeking solutions and state leaders.
“It’s super troublesome to me,” Humble said. “If you’re going to go with a different model, it should be something that is publicly available and disclosed to where anybody can go in and look at the assumptions that are built into the model.”
