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State health department tells university COVID-19 modeling team to stop work, limits data access

The Arizona Department of Health Services told a team of university experts working on COVID-19 modeling to "pause" its work, an email from

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The Arizona Department of Health Services told a team of university experts working on COVID-19 modeling to “pause” its work, an email from a department leader shows.

The modeling team of about two dozen professors at Arizona State University and the University of Arizona was compiling the most robust public model in Arizona of COVID-19.

The email, from DHS bureau chief of public health statistics S. Robert Bailey, came on Monday evening, after Gov. Doug Ducey announced plans to begin easing social distancing in the coming days. […]

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 had shown that reopening at the end of May was the only scenario that didn’t dramatically increase cases. […]

Bailey wrote that health department leadership asked the team to “pause” all work on projections and modeling. The department would also be ending access to special data sets the modeling team had been using for their efforts, Bailey said.