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\u2019s Regions Hospital.<\/p>
That Friday, Kulasingam called her and two other research assistants to ask if anyone could \u201cwork through the day and night\u201d to get a COVID-19 model to Minnesota Governor Tim Walz the following Monday. They all jumped at the chance.<\/p>
\u201cI don\u2019t 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,\u201d said Kirkeide, a four-year recipient of the Patrick F. Flynn Scholarship.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
Oddly, no grad students in economics seem to have been similarly engaged. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Personally I’m less concerned that it was produced by grad students in a weekend. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
I’m more concerned by who reviewed it, how, and via what standard. Because science is about questioning hypotheses. Who questioned this model? How? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
More than that? I want to know why the Walz Administration treated this model like a state military secret for the past two months. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[416],"tags":[423],"class_list":["post-74136","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-covid19","tag-the-endless-emergency"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74136","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=74136"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74136\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":74146,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74136\/revisions\/74146"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=74136"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=74136"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=74136"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}