The White House coronavirus task force gave increasingly urgent recommendations to states about masks over the summer, only to have them mostly ignored by six states, their weekly reports show.
The task force has declined to make the reports public, but the House Select Subcommittee on Coronavirus , from June 23 up to Aug. 9, earlier this week.
The reports show that the task force made tailored recommendations to each state — including recommendations about mask use.
CNN has obtained this week's task force recommendations for Missouri and Iowa.
The task force pointed to universities as a major factor contributing to the virus' spread.
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"University towns need a comprehensive plan that scales immediately for testing all returning students with routine surveillance testing to immediately identify new cases and outbreaks and isolate and quarantine," the report says.
The Missouri report recommended officials in the state close bars and mandate masks. Missouri currently has the 10th highest case rate in the country.
The Aug. 30 report said community transmission "continues to be high in rural and urban counties," and also noted concerns with "increasing transmission in the major university towns."
"Bars must be closed," the report warned.
And, per the Missouri report, the task force now recommends a statewide mask mandate, saying, "Mask mandates across the state must be in place to decrease transmission." Previous reports recommended masks in hotspot counties.
The Midwest spread comes months after five Republican governors in "heartland" states, including Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds and Missouri Gov. Mike Parson, penned a touting their states' handling of the pandemic.
"Here in the country's heartland, decisions have been made based on sound medical and social science, positioning our states to thrive individually as our economies reopen," the May 5 op-ed read, adding that Plains states "have managed this emergency exceptionally well by many measures."
"Our states' experiences offer collective proof that a one-size-fits-all approach is not the best way to address unique circumstances. When shaping our state plans, each of us has relied on our own public health teams, informed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other national experts. We knew it was critical, even as the coronavirus has spread, that our state economies keep moving," the governors wrote.
Many of the recommendations from the task force reports suggest more targeted mask wearing in "red zone" and "yellow zone" counties or "evolving hotspots." But some states — Oklahoma, Nebraska, Iowa, Mississippi, Georgia and South Carolina — were advised to enact mask mandates statewide in the most recent Aug. 9 report. They have all failed to do so more than three weeks later.
All of the states that do not have some form of statewide mask mandates are led by Republican governors. They include Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Iowa, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah and Wyoming.
The White House lambasted the House committee's publication of the reports.
"In the midst of an ongoing pandemic, some members of Congress have chosen to irresponsibly issue a partisan report completely for the purpose of falsely distorting the president's record to protect the health and safety of the American people and save millions of lives," White House deputy press secretary Judd Deere said in a statement.
