White House Releases Weekly Coronavirus Reports For Illinois

ILLINOIS — After months of being hidden from public view, weekly reports sent to Illinois 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.

As a whole, the report paints a mixed picture — of a state headed in the right direction but where new cases and daily deaths remain far too high.

Here are a few of the things we learned:

• Illinois' new cases per 100,000 residents dropped 19 percent from last week
• COVID-19 deaths have dropped 14 percent week over week
• Hospital admissions have fallen 4 percent week over week
• New cases, at 269 per 100,000, remain firmly in the red zone
• The number of understaffed hospitals has spiked 12 percent in the last week

Read the full report here:

State health officials reported 4,191 new cases of the coronavirus Thursday and 103 more deaths from COVID-19, the respiratory illness caused by the virus. Since the start of the pandemic, more than 1.1 million Illinoisans have been infected and 19,067 have died.

As of Thursday, 2,802 people were hospitalized for COVID-19 statewide, including 567 in intensive care and 292 on ventilators. The statewide case positivity rate — a rolling, seven-day average — is now 4.3 percent. The test positivity rate is 5.5 percent.

To date, nearly 1.3 million doses of the coronavirus vaccine have been delivered to providers across Illinois, and 829,488 doses have been administered — about 36,728 doses per day.

According to the Biden administration, the release of the weekly state reports is the president's latest move 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.