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Let me tell you about an email I got this morning from the @govkristinoem senior adviser, Maggie Seidel, recently of Wash D.C. But before I do, first, a little about the history of my relationship with the governor, because you deserve transparency.
I have covered her since she was a freshman in the #SDLeg in 2007, and to put it bluntly, I was among the first to recognize her considerable political skills.
In 2010, on the night the Leg gaveled out of session, I was standing on the House floor with Speaker Tim Rave. She hugged Rave, and offered to hug me. I declined for obvious reasons. But as she's said, she's a hugger.
Over the years I've covered her rise in politics. Her critics have claimed she's just a pretty dumb girl. She is not. She is smart. She's not learned like Stephanie Herseth Sandlin, her one-time opponent. But she's not dumb.
Like all of us, she has flaws. And one of her primary POLITICAL flaws is that she is TOO moralistic at times, which causes her to be stubborn, to her political detriment. Think hemp.
Over all these years, we at @argusleader have covered her the way we would cover any political leader. There are always good times and bad, but I have been nothing but respectful of her. Now, w/o further ado, the issue at hand:
Seidel, the governors D.C. swamp creature, takes issue with the story that posted yesterday about SD's coronavirus model, what I call the blue blob. Here's the story: https://www.argusleader.com/story/news/2020/04/10/whats-behind-south-dakotas-coronavirus-model-health-officials-wont-say/5133808002/
Her email (which I will happily forward to anyone who wants it, as well as my correspondence to her) accuses us of not telling both sides of the story and of not being satisfied with the answers we received.
To summarize, the story is about how officials at the state and the 3 health systems that participated in the model have not talked about the assumptions and data that went into the model.
Even before the model was released, I was asking for modeling data. I'm a data guy. I wanted the numbers. When my first request last week was ignored by the DOH, I looped in Seidel and the governor's chief of staff, @Tony_Venhuizen
To her credit, Seidel responded very soon after, first by email and then phone. In her email this morning, she says that in our phone call Tuesday, she provided me with "data inputs." Our conversation, BTW, was off the record, at her insistence.
I don't have notes of the conversation cuz I don't take notes of off-record convos for fear of putting that info into stories. But even the numbers she claims she did give me are largely meaningless.
She agreed to send me the state formula if we agreed not to publish. We agreed, deciding there was no news value to publishing a formula. What she sent me was an equation, but the equation didn't include values, the underlying data.
It didn't include assumptions: Numbers of susceptible, estimated infection rates (beta value), estimated numbers of recovered, dead (gamma value). The equation is meaningless without data. I followed that day (Tuesday) with a request for those.
Also, it seemed reasonable to me that the state might have different assumptions for different parts of the state. After all, we have rural swaths and with little population and more dense urban areas. So I asked about that.
Never got em. But apparently I was supposed to be satisfied with that. And satisfied that the 3 health systems that participated in the creation of our model all basically no commented me when I asked for details about what they contributed.
True. I'm not satisfied with non-answers. Yesterday, Minnesota released its latest model. With it came about 40 pages of information explaining it, including different scenarios using different data points. For all I know, ours comes from a gumball machine.
Given our Sitrep, I recognize officials are under great pressure, and we should all hope they succeed. I think there are merits to the governor's approach. But at the end of the day, my job is to tell you, the taxpayers, how they are handling this.
I'm not going to allow a bozo from Bozoland rewrite history here. Also, just so we're clear, which I've been crystal over the years: I'm not a member of a political tribe. I believe in widespread weed and guns. That should tell you all you need to know.
