NOTE: This story has been updated to reflect that the state released the modeling data on Sunday. 

For the past few weeks, state health department officials have been working with an expert task force of physicians, researchers and mathematicians from local universities to try to predict how the novel coronavirus spreading across the world might progress locally. 

The group of specialists provided three reports to the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment, as of the end of last week, and Gov. Jared Polis presented some of the findings of the experts during a press conference Friday, March 27. Polis relayed some stark estimates during the press conference, with possible COVID-19 deaths in Colorado ranging from 900 to 33,200. 

GovernorPolisPresentation2020-03-27.pptx.pdf

On Sunday, the CDPHE released the modeling data that the expert team had provided. According to a release, they modeled the pandemic using approaches tailored to Colorado, updating the modeling as the disease continues to spread in the state, using The team uses a fundamental approach: the SEIR model. The basics of the models are intuitive: prior to infection, individuals are susceptible (S) and once exposed (E) and infected (I) they are contagious, whether symptomatic or asymptomatic; those infected may recover and become resistant (R) or become sufficiently ill to need hospitalization and possibly critical care and to die. This standard model is thus abbreviated as the SEIR model. 

During an April 2 web-streaming press conference, Scott Bookman, CDPHE’s COVID-19 incident commander, said the expert research gives them reason to believe that the number of COVID-19 cases in Colorado is between four and 10 times higher than what’s currently known.

CDPHE’s records manager told Colorado Politics on April 3 that they needed to delay the release of the records because of “extenuating circumstances.” Colorado public records law allows government agencies to spend up to seven days in addition to the three days allowed by law to produce copies of public records, when they’re formally requested. 

But the “extenuating circumstances” provision of Colorado law allows the extra seven days only when a request is broad, voluminous or insufficiently specific, or if the records are impossible to compile within three days, or if, “an impending deadline or period of peak demand that is either unique or not predicted to recur more frequently than once a month” requires “all or substantially all” of the agency’s resources. Despite added complications or “peak demand” to the state health department due to work associated with the spread of the coronavirus, the agency has processed other formal records requests in recent days and weeks – just not for the expert research provided by the university task force.

Jeff Roberts, the executive director of the Colorado Freedom of Information Coalition, said the state health department should, especially in times when providing information can mean the health of Coloradans, provide access to reports that are compiled and complete. And they should provide them proactively, he said. 

“The extenuating circumstances is understandable in this time, for records that really do have to be compiled and gone over for privilege, but if we’re talking about reports that are done, and they know what’s in these reports, then I would say that information should be provided in an expeditious way to the public and the journalists working to informing the public,” Roberts said. “And I would add the health department should be providing this proactively, without having to use a request. If there’s anything that’s privileged, then they should redact that, prior to proactive release.”