For most of the past seven months, the White House COVID Task Force, under President Trump, has sent out weekly reports on their take on each state’s COVID-19 status and response. Those reports were sent to the states but not made publicly available. The explanation from the White House was that it was up to individual states to make those reports public. Colorado was not one of them.

By December, according to CNN, the White House had stopped sending those reports even to the states.

Those who advocate for more federal transparency on the pandemic have help this week from the White House, under the new Biden administration.

Cyrus Shahpar, the White House COVID-19 Data Director, announced Wednesday those weekly state reports will now be available online. Colorado’s Jan. 24 report had information the state has not disclosed, including how many vaccine doses it has received. That’s at 692,700, according to the White House, while just under 500,000 doses have been used to vaccinate Coloradans, for both the first and second doses. 

Liz Essley Whyte, an investigative reporter with the Center for Public Integrity, had been able to obtain some of those state by state reports in 2020. Those reports are important, Whyte tweeted Wednesday, because “it can help people know whether it’s too risky to cross state lines to visit relatives. It can help them know whether federal experts agree with the mitigation measures their states are taking.”

Withholding those reports, tweeted Ryan Panchadsaram of COVID Act Now, which tracks state progress on the virus, “allowed elected leaders to call COVID a hoax & people believed it.”

A House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis blasted the Trump administration in August for withholding those reports. Committee chair Rep. James Clyburn, D-SC, said the reports directly contradicted the Administration’s “rosy public statements downplaying the threat of the virus.” Clyburn’s committee pushed for release of the reports. 

“The White House has known since June that coronavirus cases were surging across the country and many states were becoming dangerous ‘red zones’ where the virus was spreading fast,” Clyburn said in an August 31 statement. “Rather than being straight with the American people and creating a national plan to fix the problem, the President and his enablers kept these alarming reports private while publicly downplaying the threat to millions of Americans. As a result of the President’s failures, more than 58,000 additional Americans have died since the Task Force first started issuing private warnings, and many of the Task Force’s recommendations still have not been implemented. It is long past time that the Administration finally implement a national plan to contain this crisis, which is still killing hundreds of Americans each day.”

It wasn’t just information at risk; Clyburn’s committee claimed in a follow-up letter in September that the White House weakened the reports’ scientific recommendations, especially for states that ignored prior Task Force recommendations and were facing severe COVID-19 outbreaks.

Colorado’s most recent report, dated Jan. 24 and released Jan. 27, showed the state is still in the red zone for new cases as well as for the number of deaths (119) per 100,000 population.

The report said Colorado has received 692,700 vaccine doses, a number not publicly disclosed on the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment’s immunization website. So far, according to the White House report, 355,124 Coloradans had gotten their first dose as of January 24; the CDPHE reported 393,626 Coloradans immunized with their first vaccine as of Jan. 26 and a total of 493,188 total doses administered, including those receiving their second dose.

The White House report said that all but one state (Hawaii) is still in the red zone for new COVID-19 cases in the past week.

The White House COVID Task Force Report for Colorado, Jan. 27, 2021