Thursday, May 7, 2020

Doubletalk Ducey Turns Tail; Re-Traces his Steps in Double Time

Just a day ago, the Arizona Eagletarian (and others) decried the brazen Trump ass-kissing being done by Doubletalk Doug Ducey in the wake of the #OrangeMenace's grandstanding at a Honeywell plant in Phoenix. Local news media including the Arizona Republic and the Arizona Capitol Times, in addition to the Washington Post (see below) pushed back (okay, more like shoved the way Pat Tillman used to do for the ASU Sun Devil football team) hard.
“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.
Today, Arizona Dept of Health Services director Cara Christ euphemistically said, "Never mind."

This screenshot tweeted by ABC15 investigator @MelissaBlasius just before 3pm today.



The Arizona Department of Health Services said on Thursday that it will have an "ongoing partnership" with the university experts who were producing COVID-19 modeling before being told on Monday by the department to "pause" their work.
The abrupt turn comes after pressure from Democratic lawmakers, including U.S. Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, and local and national media attention.
Dale Carnegie, decades ago, in his seminal work on How to Make Friends and Influence People noted the importance of allowing people to "save face."

So, what major news outlets do, when they let people like Ducey and Dr. Christ off the hook might at times be reasonable and justified. But if that's ALL a journalistic organ wants to do, "powers that be" will, have, and frequently do exploit it. That's the root of government corruption.

Case in point: Any and everything you hear from Trump and his minions (no, not the cute animated movie minions) is that he has done a "fantastic job." Except that he has not. In fact, NO COUNTRY is doing WORSE in response to the pandemic, and no country has had more cases of coronavirus infection (per capita) than the United States. NONE. See endcoronavirus.org/countries.

That's right. The fact, the reality, and the TRUTH are the opposite of what the Orange Menace proclaims.

Last night's Arizona Eagletarian blog post quoted the Yellow Sheet Report
(UofAZ Prof) Gerald said the group feels the Ninth Floor is lifting restrictions too quickly and the moves are shortsighted, if the ultimate goal is leading Arizona down a path of fewer cases and deaths. “I’m not sure we would necessarily disagree with it per se, except to more transparently convey the notion that there is a tradeoff between resumption of economic activities and the health consequences,” Gerald said. “We know more people are going to get sick and more people are going to die. Maybe that’s a tradeoff we’re willing to make.”
Maybe Dr. Gerald was trying to be diplomatic, but that is an outrageous statement.

NO, Damn it, it is NOT a tradeoff that we even should be considering. Here's what NY Gov. Andrew Cuomo said,
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said Thursday that he’s not willing to trade people’s lives to reopen the state’s economy, saying it’s “absurd” to argue over how many deaths are worth reopening the state.
“This is not a situation where you can go to the American people and say, ‘How many lives are you willing to lose to reopen the economy?’ We don’t want to lose any lives. You start to hear these, to me, what are absurd arguments,” Cuomo said at his daily press briefing.
The Orange Menace is now calling on Americans to be warriors, "The people of this country should think of themselves as warriors. Our country has to open." 

Ask yourself this: what are warriors expected to do? Trump didn't define what part of warrior he was asking the American people to be. However, has he DONE anything over the last couple of months to PROTECT warriors? Or does his rhetorical context simply suggest that he expects people to die as a result of the virus so that he can take credit for restoring the American economy?

Has he done or said anything to suggest he's even willing to bestow any kind of honor on those who sacrifice their lives for his glory?

*****

Hours after Doug Ducey, the Republican governor of Arizona, accelerated plans to reopen businesses, saying the state was “headed in the right direction,” his administration halted the work of a team of experts projecting it was on a different — and much grimmer — course.
... Ducey’s health department shut down the work of academic experts predicting the peak of the state’s coronavirus outbreak was still about two weeks away. [...]
The move to sideline academic experts in the middle of the pandemic reflects growing friction between plans to resume economic activity and the analysis of epidemiologists that underscores the dangers of rolling back restrictions. Officials in Arizona said they would rely on “real-time” information, as well as modeling conducted by federal agencies, which is not released publicly.
During his visit to Arizona on Tuesday, Trump pressed states to pursue aggressive reopening strategies even as he acknowledged “some people will be affected badly.” Governors from Georgia to Iowa have stepped ahead of the recommendations of doctors and epidemiologists in their states, beginning phased reopenings before they met the administration’s nonbinding guidelines. Recent polling suggests they have done so against the wishes of most Americans, who support sweeping precautions to slow the spread of the virus.
But experts said Arizona’s dismissal of academics, whose analysis seems at odds with the state’s approach, marked an alarming turn against data-informed decision-making.
“The approach seems to be, ‘Shoot the messenger — and quick,’ ” said Josiah D. Rich, an epidemiologist at Brown University.
The Arizona health department was pulling back “the special data sets which have been shared under this public health emergency effort,” according to the Monday email from Bailey, which was first reported by an ABC affiliate in Phoenix. [...]
The move also troubled some federal lawmakers. “We can’t just remove scientific data and bury facts when it contradicts an agenda or narrative,” said Rep. Ann Kirkpatrick (D-Ariz.).
Will Humble, a former Arizona health director, said he was concerned by the timing of the abrupt suspension of the modeling work — hours after Ducey had announced plans to ease restrictions on restaurants and barbershops, among other retailers. [...]
Here comes some doubletalk from Ducey's spokesman,
Patrick Ptak, a spokesman for the governor, said the department’s determination “had nothing to do with” the president’s travel to Arizona, or the governor’s Monday announcement about new steps in the state’s gradual reopening. He said the decision was made by the state’s health director, Cara Christ, “after reviewing all of the data.” [...]
But Humble said the state is eluding accountability by relying on nonpublic modeling. The academic partnership yielded public reports, the most recent of which predicted that the state’s peak of cases would not arrive before mid-May.
Ptak said the state is working to see if Arizona-specific projections can be made public.
“Good practice is always to use multiple models and multiple inputs,” said Elizabeth Carlton, an assistant professor of environmental and occupational health at the Colorado School of Public Health. “A smart state program will consult a lot of different data sources.”
Efforts in other states to selectively interpret and display coronavirus cases to suit political ends are also raising concerns among epidemiologists.
Iowa experts who presented the state with models saying it was too early to reopen said they were ignored.
“My concern is that the [Iowa Department of Public Health] — they’ve been saying the curve has been declining for a month now and it never really has,” said Eli Perencevich, an epidemiologist at the University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine and a member of the team preparing modeling for state health officials.
*****
My take on the Doug Ducey's double time turn around is that even awkward pols can be held accountable to the will of the people when the public outcry is loud and sustained. But unlike the astroturf warriors who advanced on state capitols recently with their irresponsible toys and firearms, DATA can be a much more powerful force for accountability.



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