Is the Trump Administration Keeping Information from Us?

The short answer is yes.

Data from the White House coronavirus task force released today shows that the reports Trump was receiving about the spread of the pandemic in July and August were actually getting increasingly worse. The House Select Subcomittee on Coronavirus on Monday published eight weeks' worth of state reports compiled by the White House task force. The force releases these reports each week to the governors of each state, and has previously declined to make this information available to the public or to confirm the credibility of any data reported. In IB terms, they did not provide us an OPVL (or really a Works Cited at all).

The most recent of the reports was dated August 9. Since then, the course of the pandemic has changed, showing both progress in certain places and decline in others. This report from August 9 has a section for each state, which includes specific data on their cases, as well as recommendations for openings or closings. Red zone states means that there are more than 100 new cases per 100,000 population and/or test positivity is about 10%. For reference, there were 20 states in the "red zone" on the August 9 report. Yellow zone states are between 10 and 100 new cases per 100,000 population and/or test positivity between 5 and 10%. The Yellow Zone houses 28 states. Only two states, Maine and Vermont, were in the green zone.

The problem with not releasing this data to the public is that Trump has a bad habit of cherry-picking only the positive data from these reports, leading to a contorted view of reality. He claims that coronavirus cases are rising due to increased testing, when in reality many states in the report have rising test positivity rates (the proportion of people who test positive compared to negative). He even talked about how cases in Florida and Arizona are going down when both states are still experiencing significant spread and are still in the red zone.

I personally do not see the harm in releasing this information to the public. If officials are worried that we are going to misinterpret the information, I raise the argument that I honestly don't see how it can get more misinterpreted than what Trump is currently tweeting. This fight is far from over, and while Trump wants his people to believe that we are at the finish line and we can stop sprinting, we are actually about halfway in and need to slow down to regain enough energy to finish the race. In order to do that, we need to know how much energy (or in this case, how many cases and how many tests are positive) we need to finish the race safely and not have the ground fall out from beneath us.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2020/08/31/politics/coronavirus-task-force-state-reports/index.html

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