Sunday Fact Fest, Episode 02: COVID death surge? It's real, and "the virus has done exactly what public-health experts expected."

Welcome to the ICU, Libertarians.

Narcissists don't care about others. When you don't care about others, it's easier to rationalize when they die. Let the rationalizations renew; after all, it's an election year.

A Second Coronavirus Death Surge Is Coming, by Alexis C. Madrigal (The Atlantic, via Medium)

There was always a logical, simple explanation for why cases rose through the end of June while deaths did not

... There is no mystery in the number of Americans dying from COVID-19.

Despite political leaders trivializing the pandemic, deaths are rising again: The seven-day average for deaths per day has now jumped by more than 200 since July 6, according to data compiled by the COVID Tracking Project at The Atlantic. By our count, states reported 855 deaths today, in line with the recent elevated numbers in mid-July.

The deaths are not happening in unpredictable places. Rather, people are dying at higher rates where there are lots of COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations: in Florida, Arizona, Texas, and California, as well as a host of smaller southern states that all rushed to open up.

The deaths are also not happening in an unpredictable amount of time after the new outbreaks emerged. Simply look at the curves yourself. Cases began to rise on June 16; a week later, hospitalizations began to rise. Two weeks after that — 21 days after cases rose — states began to report more deaths. That’s the exact number of days that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has estimated from the onset of symptoms to the reporting of a death.

Many people who don’t want COVID-19 to be the terrible crisis that it is have clung to the idea that more cases won’t mean more deaths. Some Americans have been perplexed by a downward trend of national deaths, even as cases exploded in the Sun Belt region. But given the policy choices that state and federal officials have made, the virus has done exactly what public-health experts expected.

When states reopened in late April and May with plenty of infected people within their borders, cases began to grow. COVID-19 is highly transmissible, makes a large subset of people who catch it seriously ill, and kills many more people than the flu or any other infectious disease circulating in the country.

Trumpolini's bogus pandemic stats and the flowering of the GOP's death cult.

You're entitled to your own opinion, just not your own facts.

Donald Trump rushed to reopen America – now Covid is closing in on him, by Robert Reich (The Guardian)

The surge in cases isn’t because America is doing more tests for the virus, as Trump contends. Cases are rising even where testing is declining. In Wisconsin, cases soared 28% over the past two weeks, as the number of tests decreased by 14%. Hospitals in Texas, Florida and Arizona are filling up with Covid-19 patients. Deaths are expected to resume their gruesome ascent.

The surge is occurring because America reopened before Covid-19 was contained ...

It's the very Nadir of the Know Nothings.

No, President Trump, Testing Is Not Causing Case Counts to Rise. The Virus Is Just Spreading Faster, by Charles Ornstein and Ash Ngu (ProPublica)

The Trump administration has doubled down on its claims that coronavirus case counts are up because the U.S. has increased testing. However, a closer look at graphs of testing numbers and positive cases shows that this isn’t the case for many states.

The Washington Post's Jennifer Rubin bears scrutiny, given the bizarre inaccuracy of her analysis v.v. the recently contested Kentucky primary.

However, this home run travels about 535 feet.

This outcome is the triumph of Republicans’ tribal politics, in which identification with the cult and assault on the truth win out over common sense, science and even self-preservation. To be a Republican — at least in the eyes of millions of them — means to adopt illogical, anti-factual beliefs and oppositional conduct. You cannot take seriously the threats of climate change or the novel coronavirus because … well, because that is not what Republicans do, and to do otherwise would be to concede that the dreaded radical left and elites (presumably one can be both) are right. At the extremes, Republicans will engage in objectively destructive conduct to prove their point — hoarding hydroxychloroquine even if the Food and Drug Administration says the drug is ineffective or dangerous, and, of course, going without masks.

Yes, that's it.

Georgia "is about to find out how many people need to lose their lives to shore up the economy."

It would be fascinating if not for the gruesomeness.

Georgia’s Experiment in Human Sacrifice, by Amanda Mull (The Atlantic)

The state is about to find out how many people need to lose their lives to shore up the economy

At first, Derek Canavaggio thought he would be able to ride out the coronavirus pandemic at home until things were safe. As a bar manager at the Globe in Athens, Georgia, Canavaggio hasn’t been allowed to work for weeks. Local officials in Athens issued Georgia’s first local shelter-in-place order on March 19, canceling the events that usually make spring a busy time for Athens bars and effectively eliminating the city’s rowdy downtown party district built around the University of Georgia. The state’s governor, Brian Kemp, followed in early April with a statewide shutdown.

But then the governor sent Canavaggio into what he calls “spreadsheet hell.” In an announcement last week, Kemp abruptly reversed course on the shutdown, ending many of his own restrictions on businesses and overruling those put in place by mayors throughout the state. On Friday, gyms, churches, hair and nail salons, and tattoo parlors were allowed to reopen, if the owners were willing. Yesterday, restaurants and movie theaters came back. The U-turn has left Georgians scrambling. Canavaggio has spent days crunching the numbers to figure out whether reopening his bar is worth the safety risk, or even feasible in the first place, given how persistent safety concerns could crater demand for a leisurely indoor happy hour. “We can’t figure out a way to make the numbers work to sustain business and pay rent and pay everybody to go back and risk their lives,” he told me. “If we tried to open on Monday, we’d be closed in two weeks, probably for good and with more debt on our hands.”

Kemp’s order shocked people across the country. For weeks, Americans have watched the coronavirus sweep from city to city, overwhelming hospitals, traumatizing health-care workers, and leaving tens of thousands of bodies in makeshift morgues. Georgia has been hit particularly hard by the pandemic, and the state’s testing efforts have provided an incomplete look at how far the virus continues to spread. That testing capacity — which public-health leaders consider necessary for safely ending lockdowns — has lagged behind the nation’s for much of the past two months. Kemp’s move to reopen was condemned by scientists, high-ranking Republicans from his own state, and Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms; it even drew a public rebuke from President Donald Trump, who had reportedly approved the measures before distancing himself from the governor amid the backlash.

Public-health officials broadly agree that reopening businesses — especially those that require close physical contact — in places where the virus has already spread will kill people ...