White House Releases Weekly Virus Reports For Massachusetts

MASSACHUSETTS — After months of being hidden from public view, weekly reports sent to Massachusetts by the White House coronavirus response team have a new, publicly accessible home.

Cyrus Shahpar, COVID-19 data director for the Biden administration, announced the move in a tweet Wednesday afternoon.

“First post: We are now sharing previously hidden weekly COVID-19 state profile reports with the public,” Shahpar tweeted.

The release of the weekly state reports marks a stark contrast between the response of the current administration and its predecessor.

For the most part, the Trump administration had kept the weekly reports under wraps, sharing them with state governors but not with the general public. While some governors would share the reports at a state level, not all did.

The reports often contained key county-level data as well as federal recommendations by health experts that, if enacted, could potentially curb the spread of coronavirus.

The reason for keeping them hidden, according to a report by the nonprofit Center for Public Integrity, was to encourage states to lead their own response to the pandemic.

Dr. Deborah Birx, a leader of the White House task force under former President Donald Trump, said on a private call last summer that the reports were “critical to really ensure we’re all looking at the same data and all looking at the same mitigation efforts,” according to a separate report by the Center for Public Integrity.

However, just before Christmas, the coronavirus task force under Trump stopped its proactive approach to sending out the reports. Instead, the task force said it would only distribute reports if states requested them.

Here’s what we learned in the first Massachusetts report:

• The rate of new cases per 100,000 people was higher in Massachusetts than in the country as a whole: Massachusetts had a rate of 428 cases per 100,000 people, compared to 381 cases per 100,000 people in the United States.
• The number of deaths from COVID-19 in the state dropped 10 percent from the previous week. There were 471 deaths reported in Massachusetts in the report issued Jan. 24.
• The number of hospitals with staff shortages remained the same from the week before, at 11 percent.

The release of the weekly state reports is the latest move by the Biden administration to bring transparency back to the White House.

Within hours of Joe Biden’s inauguration, press secretary Jen Psaki held her first press briefing at the White House. During it, Psaki — who served as the chief spokeswoman at the State Department under President Barack Obama — told reporters she had a “deep respect for the role of a free and independent press in our democracy.”

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, also said Americans should expect a “transparent, open and honest” response to the coronavirus under Biden.