Shot in the Dark

Yeah, We’re In The Best Of Hands

About a month or so ago, I wondered – why is the Minnesota Department of Health treating its “model” like the plans for a nuclear submarine?

One guess – because it was cobbled together over the weekend by a couple of graduate students.

Before Friday, March 20, Marina Kirkeide was a part-time research assistant at the University of Minnesota School of Public Health (SPH), working on human papillomavirus transmission for associate professor Shalini Kulasingam. On a gap year before starting medical school at the University in fall 2020, the College of Science and Engineering alumna also had a second job as a lab tech at St. Paul’s Regions Hospital.

That Friday, Kulasingam called her and two other research assistants to ask if anyone could “work through the day and night” to get a COVID-19 model to Minnesota Governor Tim Walz the following Monday. They all jumped at the chance.

“I don’t think a lot of researchers get to work on something over the weekend and have public figures talk about it and make decisions based on it three days later,” said Kirkeide, a four-year recipient of the Patrick F. Flynn Scholarship.

Oddly, no grad students in economics seem to have been similarly engaged.

Personally I’m less concerned that it was produced by grad students in a weekend.

I’m more concerned by who reviewed it, how, and via what standard. Because science is about questioning hypotheses. Who questioned this model? How?

More than that? I want to know why the Walz Administration treated this model like a state military secret for the past two months.

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Mitch Berg

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63 responses to “Yeah, We’re In The Best Of Hands”

  1. bosshoss429 Avatar
    bosshoss429

    The simple answer is that with all of the DemocRATs virtually screaming “believe the scientists and the medical experts, like Dr. “Flip Flopping Quack” Fauci, he probably doesn’t want it know that it was built by grad students. Noticed that the coward didn’t attend the briefing again last night.

  2. bosshoss429 Avatar
    bosshoss429

    A friend just sent this to me. You may have to register with the Duluth News Tribune to read it, but it is worth the read.

    https://www.duluthnewstribune.com/opinion/columns/6489828-Local-View-Minnesotans-call-it-what-it-is-a-scamdemic#.Xr1IZlq_WOQ.facebook

  3. jdm Avatar
    jdm

    It occurs to me to wonder if all other countries and/or states have also cobbled together a model themselves as well. Are there multiple “models”? Do any one of them work? Well?

    And also, as I feared, this one was done in an academic environment where there is no accountability for being wrong. Or as Thomas Sowell once said, It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.

    I have come to the conclusion that the woman who did the Ferguson code review was extremely smart, and especially when she concluded that “I’d go further and suggest that all academic epidemiology be defunded. This sort of work is best done by the insurance sector. Insurers employ modellers and data scientists, but also employ managers whose job is to decide whether a model is accurate enough for real world usage and professional software engineers to ensure model software is properly tested, understandable and so on. Academic efforts don’t have these people, and the results speak for themselves“.

  4. jdm Avatar
    jdm

    Of course. Moderated. Eff.

  5. Mammuthus Primigenius Avatar
    Mammuthus Primigenius

    It’s not the grad student’s fault. It not UM’s fault. This is on Walz, who failed to do what political leaders are supposed to do — seek out multiple points of view and weigh the interests of all affected parties.

  6. Mammuthus Primigenius Avatar
    Mammuthus Primigenius

    The age demographics of people in China who died of Covid-19 is quite close to what we are experiencing in the US. Data about co-morbidities is missing, but I bet that is close to the US data, too.
    There was never any reason to do other than protect vulnerable populations while the rest of took common sense precautions and went about our business.
    I wonder if the male-female imbalance in fatalities is due to men being more likely than women to contract aids?
    A quick check shows that 81% of Americans with HIV are men.

  7. Mitch Berg Avatar
    Mitch Berg

    Data about co-morbidities is missing, but I bet that is close to the US data, too.

    Wuhan is a heavy-industry city, with Chinese-level pollution standards. Lung problems are a constant problem – it’s like having a city with millions of smoker, with all the pathologies that go with. Wuhanians are disproportionally prone to COPD, lung cancer, emphysema and other lung ailments.

  8. kinlaw Avatar
    kinlaw

    Boss: dem-panic.

  9. Mammuthus Primigenius Avatar
    Mammuthus Primigenius

    If, as I suspect, virtually all of the covid-19 dead had serious health issues (even the young), this will become clear in the the next few weeks or months.
    The governors will be exposed as having made a terrible mistake. People died who did not have to die, economies were destroyed, and if a new pandemic breaks out, no one will take the governors seriously.
    Kind of the worst of all possible outcomes.

  10. jdm Avatar
    jdm

    There was never any reason to do other than protect vulnerable populations while the rest of took common sense precautions and went about our business.

    That is easy to say in retrospect, but the fact is that things are run for the votes of and so on behalf of Karens (aka white suburban upper-class women).

  11. Night Writer Avatar
    Night Writer

    MP – the truth may well be out there, but that doesn’t mean it will be allowed to be seen.

  12. jdm Avatar
    jdm

    … and some of those women are in government.

    https://www.redstate.com/jenvanlaar/2020/05/14/woman-dictating-la-county-public-health-orders-isnt-even-a-medical-doctor/

  13. Mammuthus Primigenius Avatar
    Mammuthus Primigenius

    Night Writer on May 15, 2020 at 9:48 am said:
    MP – the truth may well be out there, but that doesn’t mean it will be allowed to be seen.

    I disagree. People aren’t that stupid. At some point it will become obvious that no one knows a covid-19 fatality (even an elderly fatality) who did not have some serious pre-existing health issues. The 19 year old healthy college kid who dies of covid-19 does not exist.

  14. Night Writer Avatar
    Night Writer

    MP – I hope you’re right, but we know the media is going to be in “Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?” mode to cover government mis-steps (that they otherwise can’t blame on Trump).

    And per jdm’s post earlier, the insurance sector should have been the ones contacted for modeling. That is my industry, and there are legions of actuaries, data scientists, and proven modeling tools available and already in use, and all of it backed by mountains of existing data – and these are constantly being rechecked. These people are professionals across all companies and they have to be good at what they do because there are real-world results and repercussions for their predictions. Some data and tools are proprietary, but the industry has a very established tradition of knowledge-sharing through its professional organizations such as the Society of Actuaries. Further, the fact is most insurance companies – health and otherwise – have been modeling pandemic for a decade or more. While there might be a cultural bias or assumption that you can’t trust corporations or business, there expert resources in the SOA and other organizations that could be engaged.

  15. bosshoss429 Avatar
    bosshoss429

    MP is correct. People are waking up. Well, at least the ones that will admit it.

    Stuff like this will continue to come out.

    https://www.dailysignal.com/2020/05/07/over-half-of-us-counties-have-had-no-covid-19-deaths/?utm_source=TDS_Email&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Top5&mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiT1RsaVpqa3lZbUl5WmpjMyIsInQiOiJVOGFLQ1ViMVBGMHNzUng3NlJmQVNhUFwvWE5wbHoxT0xYMXNpckxET1djZEJ3dXp1SzN1amxXOE9QUEpESXhMcnRad1Vaa2Q3cTU2eXlyOFRlaFpoZVRNTUJKNE93RUJEYXZxTDNuMDNMWHhzOEZXK2JDcFduNFhZOEFybmdEUnkifQ%3D%3D

  16. Emery Incognito Avatar
    Emery Incognito

    I am less worried about reopening and more concerned about the the foolish who will not wear masks, sanitize or distance because of arrogance or ignorance. That is who will sink this.

    There are those who are of the opinion the only thing that can take your freedom is the government. This couldn’t be further from the truth. When you choose to live in a group society your actions affect your neighbors and therefore make you accountable for their liberty.

  17. Mammuthus Primigenius Avatar
    Mammuthus Primigenius

    You can only be free if you can control the behavior of others.
    In other words, you can only be free if other people are not free.
    Sick.

  18. Mammuthus Primigenius Avatar
    Mammuthus Primigenius

    Touch the front of your mask. Now touch the back of it.
    Now you might as well not wear one at all.

  19. Emery Incognito Avatar
    Emery Incognito

    ^^ I see you’re getting good use of your fainting couch.

    Excessive naivety is apparently indecipherable from foolishness.

  20. jdm Avatar
    jdm

    Well put, NW. Of course, one of the problems is that any insurance company would require some time and planning to get the fundamentals of the project correct.

    But when there’s an economy to ruin, jobs to be lost, and an overly emotional fear of dead bodies piling up in the streets, time is of the essence and there is nothing better than cobbling something together over the weekend by people who are impressed by public figures talking about it and making decisions based on it three days later.

  21. Joe Doakes Avatar
    Joe Doakes

    “When you choose to live in a group society your actions affect your neighbors and therefore make you accountable for their liberty.”

    Pretentious bafflegab. Also, communism.

  22. Mammuthus Primigenius Avatar
    Mammuthus Primigenius

    It’s Karen!

  23. Mammuthus Primigenius Avatar
    Mammuthus Primigenius

    Most, if not all covid-19 fatalities are suffered by people with very serious co-morbities.
    When they talk about obesity being a comorbidity, they are talking about people with a body mass index of forty or higher.
    That is a 6′ tall person who weighs 300 lbs.
    I am beginning to believe the Swedish epidemiologist who said that they hoped to bend the curve downwards not only by achieving herd immunity, but because the people who were in such poor health that covid-19 would kill them were limited in number.
    There is a law of marginal returns in operation. The most likely to die from covid-19 die in the first few weeks or months.
    If true, this means that there will be no significant “second wave.” The people who are likely to be carried off by covid-19 departed with the first wave.
    Why doesn’t a deadly pandemic strike every year?
    Because being deadly is not a winning strategy for a virus.

  24. Mammuthus Primigenius Avatar
    Mammuthus Primigenius

    See, now this is an example of what I call “stupid journalism”: Stay-At-Home Divide Causing Tension Along Illinois-Wisconsin Border
    https://chicago.cbslocal.com/2020/05/14/stay-at-home-divide-causing-tension-at-illinois-wisconsin-border/
    “Walworth County, Wisconsin, has had 240 confirmed COVID-19 cases and 10 deaths. By comparison, McHenry County has over 1,000 cases and 56 deaths.”
    No explanation is offered for the difference in numbers. It’s magic! It just happens!
    But a quick look at the McHenry county covid-19 death stats shows that 74% of its deaths were among people 70 or older. When you compare McHenry county stats with Walworth county stats, it is immediately apparent that the difference between the two counties is that McHenry county has many long term care facilities and Walworth county has few.

  25. nerdbert Avatar
    nerdbert

    Kirkeide graduated from CSE in 2019 with a bachelor’s degree in mathematics. Now, she’s part of an interdisciplinary research team—co-led by Kulasingam and SPH associate professor Eva Enns in partnership with the Minnesota Department of Health (MDH)—modeling the spread and impact of COVID-19 in Minnesota.

    CSE graduate student Abhinav Mehta, who is pursuing a master’s degree in computer science, is also involved in the project.

    […]

    “You want to get it right the first time,” she said. “And your work has to be really, really quick.”

    So you have two people who don’t have experience to write a decent computer model making a model that will determine the economic fate of the State as well as the mortal fate of the state trying to build something over the weekend?

    We’re in the best of hands, folks.

    Bull. Fscking. Shit. What they wrote could be the basis of an academic paper where it would do little harm, but it should never have been viewed as a golden standard by which to modify our behavior.

    As a modeler, Kirkeide said, you have complete control over what your results look like. The most important thing is to have absolute integrity.

    At least she realizes that she’s incompetent unless cross checked. That’s better than the Global Warming folks. Now when she’s attacked for models that didn’t come close to right I hope she has the integrity to admit she wrote bullsh*t. Hell, I’ve written hundreds of computer simulations/models and other than well known systems where we have perfect understanding of the underlying mechanism I wouldn’t trust myself to capture the behavior in something I wrote over the weekend. And I sure wouldn’t say that it should guide something as life and death decision.

    I have no complaint about these folks trying to write models. I strenuously complain about the lack of review and the lack of responsible discussion about what’s modeled and reviewed and what isn’t. The writing of good computer models is a fine art and I’m 99.9999999% certain that this crew doesn’t meet even meet a D- standard given their inexperience, the time they had to write it, and the assumptions they had to make on human behavior.

  26. Night Writer Avatar
    Night Writer

    JDM – the actuaries and data scientists wouldn’t need much time. The underlying data is already there and being applied; tweak a couple of dials, perhaps. Even if there’s more to it, the base information and experience already on hand is deeper and more comprehensive than anything academia could readily get its hands on. The data isn’t used for looking backwards, either; it’s almost all about projecting future events (especially since, by regulation, insurance companies have to hold adequate reserves even for worst-case scenarios). The last five years or so, my company has also been investing in behavioral science and scientists to help understand why the numbers can be right, but the results aren’t.

  27. jdm Avatar
    jdm

    Interesting, NW. Thanks.

  28. nerdbert Avatar
    nerdbert

    How fscking bad have the models been written? Read this review of the Imperial College’s epidemic model code that has been used for over a decade. I have to say that this is typical of the kind of junk that professors and grad students write.

    If the most highly respected folks in this kind of modeling were putting out absolute crap, how the h*ll should we have any trust in the models these Minnesota folks have generated? No disrespect, but they don’t have the experience to know what the mistakes they will make will do, much less the experience to predict how humans might react to inputs and make changes in their behavior that will alter how the model will work.

    And the MN models have been pessimistic (and more wrong) compared to even the standard models?

    Walz praised how these models were more “Minnesota specific” and hasn’t mentioned that they’ve been nowhere near to correct. He’s the definition of a GIGO system: he’s been fed garbage and has thus governed like garbage.

  29. Mammuthus Primigenius Avatar
    Mammuthus Primigenius

    When the deadline demands that you deliver a software release on Monday, you deliver a software release on Monday.
    I always hated those bright-eyed, bushy-tailed types who high five’d one another over meeting a deadline by releasing buggy, unmaintainable spaghetti code on schedule.
    I’ve done my share of maintaining legacy code.
    I once spent a night troubleshootin a piece of software that took exposures through a multi-segmented optical train to better align its elements. But the process took a long time. Move an element, take a forty second image then move the element again and take another forty second image.
    Some bright young kid decided to make the system take images continuously, so when you clicked the “expose” button, there might be an image half way through exposure & you could simply read it out when it was done, rather than start an exposure, wait for it to finish, and then read it out.
    But sometimes you were moving an element while the image was being exposed. Uh-oh.
    It took four high wage employees several hours to find the problem & revert the software.

  30. nerdbert Avatar
    nerdbert

    You know, it would be good if we had a government organization whose job was to control diseases. Whose job involved figuring out how to predict people would act and react in a communicable disease scenario, abd how to model what would work.

    You know some Center that would be able to tell and what to do in case of a Disease that needed to be Controlled. That would be pretty slick to have, don’t you think? Something dedicated to that mission and that mission alone?

  31. nerdbert Avatar
    nerdbert

    *sigh* moderation queue hits again. Go to google and look for “code review of fergusons model” and you’ll see how badly written the “gold standard” of epidemiology for over the last decade was. I seriously doubt that something thrown together over a weekend by folks with even less experience is any better.

    GIGO isn’t just for computer models, it also applies to policy derived from the models. Walz did not apply ANY critical thinking in blindly following these recommendations.

  32. nerdbert Avatar
    nerdbert

    Twice the moderation, twice the fun! The new algorithm is something else, Mitch.

  33. jdm Avatar
    jdm

    S0 trew, nerdbert, n0w wea knead 2 avoyd n0rm@l w0rds, 2.

  34. nerdbert Avatar
    nerdbert

    @NW, I agree. As I’ve often said, models where there aren’t serious consequences for the folks who wrote them if they’re wrong should never be trusted. There simply isn’t enough feedback and critical thinking required in the drudge work of creating a computer model unless the consequences of being wrong are catastrophic. Academics have essentially no consequences for being wrong in their field (as compared to the catastrophic consequences for being caught in wrong-think), so they don’t have the necessary incentives.

    Think about what’s going to happen to your insurance company if they get their premiums set as badly as the Winnie-the-flu models have been? Those UM academics will do just fine with tenure or graduation, but your insurance company will go under.

    Your company understands that a models’ correlation to reality is usually a lucky coincidence, even when there are tremendous incentive to research and investigate the mechanisms. That’s good.

    Why so many folks intrinsically trust a model because it was run on a computer puzzles me. We’ve had decades of work and hundreds of millions spent on weather models and they’re still not valid past about 6 hours even at the largest scale, so why they trust something thrown together by a bunch of amateurs disturbs me.

  35. Joe Doakes Avatar
    Joe Doakes

    Any personal coaches on this list? Thinking about the poor grad student updating her CV, wanting to add: “Wrote computer model for state Covid response, met deadline and budget; praised by media, professors and politicians; minor performance issues.”

    What’s the correct response when she goes for the interview and they say: “Oh, you’re the one wrote THAT model?”

  36. This chopper for official use only Avatar
    This chopper for official use only

    Your Governor signed a $1.5m check for that program, lads.

    Just sit back and enjoy it.

  37. This chopper for official use only Avatar
    This chopper for official use only

    MP, Karen will be here any minute to express her disgust at your utter ignorance of SCIENCE, and to demand to speak to the manager.

  38. bosshoss429 Avatar
    bosshoss429

    nerdbert;

    I might add that if the chairman of the house intelligence committee (I know. Oxymoron), would have paid attention to the intelligence briefings about the virus and acted on them, instead of pursuing a failure of an impeachment effort with no intelligence…

  39. Mammuthus Primigenius Avatar
    Mammuthus Primigenius

    Because my place of work has recently been allowed to reopen, I was given instructions on how the state (Hawaii) is implementing “contact tracing.”
    If you test positive, you will be quarantined and any person you have been face-to-face at distance of six feet, for a period of ten minutes or more, will also also be quarantined, as well as any person they have been face to face with for ten minutes or more within a distance of six feet. masks are not mentioned.
    This tells you that the plan is unworkable (it’s the new unobtainium), and that masks do nothing.

  40. Emery Incognito Avatar
    Emery Incognito

    ^^ Executive summary: Your test is not for you; it’s for everyone else..

    Small interventions early have outsized effects later. At this stage, testing is not just an important thing; it is the most important thing.

  41. In The Mailbox: 05.15.20 (Evening Edition) : The Other McCain

    […] 40 Shark Tank: FL Democrats Accepted Money From Castro & Maduro Supporters Shot In The Dark: Yeah, We’re In The Best Of Hands STUMP: Moneypalooza Monstrosity! Let’s Check Out The State Aid In The $3 Trillion Bill The […]

  42. Mammuthus Primigenius Avatar
    Mammuthus Primigenius

    ^^ test fetishist.
    You haven’t even stated whether the tests you so desire are for the virus or the anti-bodies.
    You probably do not understand the difference. You have no idea what good or bad “testing” will do. You have stated, again and again, that we need TESTING! You have never said what good this testing is supposed to do.

  43. nerdbert Avatar
    nerdbert

    Emery, the data are in and they’re fascinating. It seems that if you look at the outbreaks on cruise ships, in prisons, naval vessels and the like (good subjects since they can’t get away and can’t refuse testing), something north of 80% of the infected are completely asymptomatic.

    So tell me, how the heck is testing going to bend the curve AT ALL when 80% of the sources don’t/can’t know they’ve been spreading it? Especially when symptoms, if they do occur, typically surface 5-14 days after exposure? Do you have any clue how much the virus will spread with those kind of numbers? Testing, while a good idea. doesn’t stand a chance in hell of containing the spread of something like this.

    Do the math. At what level do you stand a 50% of detecting an infection has occurred? If one asymptomatic person infects 3 others, you’re still less than 49% likely (1-0.8*0.8*0.8) to find someone infected by patient zero who presents symptoms so that you can find the infection tree.

    Honestly, about the only hope is a vaccine, or for the vulnerable to isolate and for everyone else to develop immunity to reduce the incidence of the virus spreading. Testing and contact tracing isn’t going to do much, frankly, to control a disease like this.

  44. Emery Incognito Avatar
    Emery Incognito

    Part of the key to success of Sweden’s approach (which includes test and trace) is simply stated in Maud Cordenius’s Opinion in the NY Times. She asserts that the government trusts the public to follow the recommendations of the Public Health Agency. The evidence that they do is borne out in the results that Sweden has achieved. The question we have to ask ourselves is could the same results be achieved in a nation that struggles with a sizable segment of society that is marked by selfish and hedonistic tendencies. Tendencies which are sometimes modeled at the top of our political hierarchy. Just wondering.

  45. Mammuthus Primigenius Avatar
    Mammuthus Primigenius

    If you think so little of Americans, and so much of the Swedes, you should move to Sweden, Emery.

  46. jdm Avatar
    jdm

    MP, the “success of the Swedish approach” seems vague as to what is being measured. What I’m seeing from the non-mainstream Swedish media is that Sweden has the highest death toll per capita in the world. Odd definition of success that.

  47. bosshoss429 Avatar
    bosshoss429

    Emery;
    Thanks for pointing out your beliefs and those of your left wing masters. They definitely have “hedonistic and selfish tendencies”, driven by desire for political power to control the lives of useful idiots like you. Good job, Comrade!

  48. Mammuthus Primigenius Avatar
    Mammuthus Primigenius

    But not cumulative deaths per million, JDM:
    https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/total-covid-deaths-per-million?tab=chart&country=OWID_WRL+GBR+SWE

    And remeber; UK has a very strict lockdown, Sweden a very lax lockdown. So where is the evidence that a strict lockdown saves lives?

  49. Emery Incognito Avatar
    Emery Incognito

    Sweden’s confirmed coronavirus deaths, on a per capita basis, are 50% higher than the US’s, and their death rate curve is climbing. This is a good thing?

    At some point, people will realize that “developing herd immunity” is code for doing nothing and letting the virus keep killing lots of people until everyone who could ultimately be susceptible to dying from it is dead. This is a strategy?

    What’s happening in the US doesn’t correlate to Sweden at all. Problem being, it doesn’t correlate to the opposite of what’s happening in Sweden either.

    Let’s skip the ‘good strategy / bad strategy’ for a while.

    I know what’s happening over here. It’s been decently explained many times. I know what’s happening in New Zealand as well — let’s exterminate the virus.

    To be honest, I also know what’s officially happening in Belarus — who cares about the virus, it’ll go away eventually.

    The thing is I have absolutely no idea what this administration’s strategy is for the US. There is no virus. The virus is a bad thing so we should protect ourselves. The virus can’t get in the way of the American way of living. The virus isn’t that bad after all. The virus is somebody elses problem.

    When I go to sleep I expect the official stance on the virus in Sweden to be the same as when I wake up the next morning.

    When I go to sleep I’m quite curious about what the official stance on the virus will be in the US when I wake up, because I have no clue.

    You can dislike the Swedish strategy, or you can dislike the NZ strategy, but at least you can feel fairly confident in having an idea about what it is.

    I fire up my browser every day and check up about the US, because I don’t have that confidence.

  50. Emery Incognito Avatar
    Emery Incognito

    Utter chaos and ensuing incompetence from the Federal Government, which led directly from Trump’s attempts to achieve some political advantage. This is the catastrophe everyone prayed would not happen while Trump was in charge. Sweden, however misguided their course may have been, should not be compared to Trump’s insufferable incompetence.

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