It is not even close to winter yet, but already there’s nothing but bad news on the COVID-19 horizon. First off, here’s a chart you’ve probably seen a bunch of times:

In the past three weeks, the number of new cases per day has increased by about 2.3x using smoothed 7-day averages. But maybe this is simply because we’re testing more? Nope:

The testing rate has been dead flat at about 1 million tests per day. So why is the case rate growing so fast? It’s simple: more people are getting infected:

Over the past three weeks, the test positivity rate has gone up about 2.2x. This accounts for the entire increase in the case rate. So what does this mean for the death rate?

Between October 1 and October 23, the case rate went up by about half. Add three weeks to that, and between October 23 and November 14 the death rate went up by . . . about half. So, since the case rate has risen about 2.3x in the past three weeks up through today, we can probably expect the death rate to increase about 2.3x between now and the end of November. That’s very close to 3,000 deaths per day.

It might be less than that, since the case fatality rate has been slowly declining. On the other hand, it might be more than that since the current unsmoothed case rate is about 180,000 per day. If that’s a more accurate measure, we could end up well over 3,000 deaths per day.

What’s more, this is hardly the worst it can get. At the moment, there’s no indication that the case rate is slowing down, which means the death rate won’t slow down either. It will slow down eventually, especially if more people get scared and start wearing masks and quarantining and just generally acting like this is a serious problem. Needless to say, this would be more likely if state governors helped things along by shutting down indoor dining at restaurants and Senate Republicans made this more palatable by agreeing to a bailout of restaurants and other highly affected businesses. That’s in addition to other assistance, mostly but not limited to aid to the unemployed.

Our first COVID-19 surge in April made me swear off crude projections, since they mostly turned out to be wrong. Partly this is because this isn’t just a pure mathematical exercise involving exponential growth. It also depends on how strongly the government puts in place countermeasures and how well the rest of us accept them, and that’s nearly impossible to predict. So don’t treat these numbers as gospel or anything close to it. They’re more like a warning: if we continue doing the minimum necessary to fight the coronavirus, we’ll almost certainly see a skyrocketing death rate. A lot of this is already baked into today’s numbers, but not all of it. We can still do better if we decide to put partisan idiocy behind us and simply agree to fight the pandemic with every tool at our disposal.

POSTSCRIPT: If you’d like to see this all in scary map form, just click here.

Here’s a picture of, oh, I don’t know, I guess it’s the Citibank Building in downtown Los Angeles. It’s a panoramic shot stitched together in Photoshop, taken from one of the elevators of the Westin Bonaventure Hotel:

I know what you’re about to say: Sure, Kevin, whatever. Kinda boring. Still, you got surprisingly little reflection through the elevator glass. That was pretty lucky. But no! This took extra-special photographic gear, pictured below:

If you put the camera right up to the glass with this huge rubber lens hood attached, the hood blocks off all the reflections. This was very, very handy at the San Diego Zoo last month.

Now, as it happens I actually bought this lens hood in hopes of using it in the rain to keep water off the lens. I haven’t had a chance to try that yet since there’s been no rain lately here in Southern California, but I’m optimistic. And if we get heavy rain? Check this out:

That should do the trick! Assuming the wind doesn’t just blow the whole thing away and I end up like Mary Poppins.

Here’s the coronavirus death toll through November 13. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

You should probably ignore the recent data from France. They have not been reliably reporting deaths over the past few days.

Here they are, our two furballs enjoying the early morning sun after being released from their nighttime confinement. Soon they will make their way around the house to the front yard jungle, where they will hide away waiting for a bird to fly into their mouths. It’s never happened yet, but hope springs eternal.

Here’s the coronavirus death toll through November 12. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

I don’t agree with Ezra Klein that our problem is too little democracy—more about that later, perhaps—but I do agree with this:

Imagine that, four years ago, Donald Trump lost the presidential election by 2.9 million votes, but there was no Electoral College to weight the results in his favor. In January 2017, Hillary Clinton was inaugurated as president, and the Trumpist faction of the GOP was blamed for blowing an election Republicans could have won. The GOP would have been locked out of presidential power for three straight terms, after winning the crucial popular vote only once since 1988. It might have lost the Supreme Court, too.

And so Republicans would likely have done what Democrats did in 1992, after they lost three straight presidential elections: reform their agenda and their messaging, and try to build a broader coalition, one capable of winning power by winning votes. This is the way democracy disciplines political parties: Parties want to win, and to do so, they need to listen to the public. But that’s only true for one of our political parties.

This is what we lost in 2016: a chance for the Republican Party to finally face up to its problems and start moving back toward the center. As Ezra notes, it generally takes at least three consecutive losses before a party is willing to do that, and the GOP win in 2016 reset that clock back to zero. Then 2020 reset it again. At this point, there’s little chance of Republican Party reform happening any time this decade.

This is what the New York office of the FBI bequeathed us. Rarely has so much been owed by so many to so few.

This spider’s name is Joe. Eventually his prey will be caught in his web and have no hope of escape no matter how much he squeals and squirms. We are all hoping that day comes soon.

In the LA Times today, Nick Goldberg asks the question on everybody’s mind:

What exactly are we witnessing here? Is this an attempted coup — a real effort by President Trump to cling to power despite the outcome of the election? Or is it a pathetic, doomed-to-fail tantrum by a petulant sore loser who will soon cave under pressure?

It’s neither. The real answer requires us to take seriously what so many of us have been saying all along: Donald Trump is mentally unbalanced. To put it a little more conventionally, he’s such an extreme narcissist that he can’t believe he lost. He literally can’t believe he lost. So his brain makes up stories for him, and the only plausible story in the face of hard numbers is that his enemies cheated. So that’s what he believes. And he’ll believe it forever. There’s no more chance of changing his mind on this than there is of changing the mind of someone in an asylum who believes he’s Jesus Christ.

As usual, though, this leads us back to the real question: Why is nearly the entire Republican Party humoring him on this? Since they aren’t collectively insane, the only answer is that they’re willing to sacrifice the public’s belief in democracy for short-term partisan gain. That isn’t nuts. It’s just despicable.

The pandemic has played hob with all our normal economic indicators, but it’s still worth paying attention to them periodically. The October inflation numbers were released today and showed no change from September. Headline inflation was 1.2 percent compared to the previous year. Core inflation, which omits food and energy, was up slightly more, but still subdued at 1.6 percent compared to the previous year:

The biggest increase was for used cars and trucks, which increased 11.5 percent compared to a year ago. New cars increased only 1.5 percent, in line with overall inflation.

Here’s the coronavirus death toll through November 11. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.