April 22, 2020

Orange County Remains an Oasis of COVID-19 Safety

I continue to be sort of fascinated by the spread of COVID-19 in California. This is mainly because Orange County, where I live, is such an outlier:

Contrary to popular belief, Orange County is pretty dense but its incidence of COVID-19 is very low. Why is that? More generally, there’s not much of a correlation between density and COVID-19 mortality at all. In the upper left of the chart you can see a bunch of counties with very low population densities but surprisingly high rates of coronavirus deaths.

For the more visually minded of you , here’s a map of Southern California from the LA Times:

Orange County is an island of moderate COVID mortality surrounded by a sea of high mortality. What’s our secret?

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THE FACTS SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES.

At least we hope they will, because that’s our approach to raising the $350,000 in online donations we need right now—during our high-stakes December fundraising push.

It’s the most important month of the year for our fundraising, with upward of 15 percent of our annual online total coming in during the final week—and there’s a lot to say about why Mother Jones’ journalism, and thus hitting that big number, matters tremendously right now.

But you told us fundraising is annoying—with the gimmicks, overwrought tone, manipulative language, and sheer volume of urgent URGENT URGENT!!! content we’re all bombarded with. It sure can be.

So we’re going to try making this as un-annoying as possible. In “Let the Facts Speak for Themselves” we give it our best shot, answering three questions that most any fundraising should try to speak to: Why us, why now, why does it matter?

The upshot? Mother Jones does journalism you don’t find elsewhere: in-depth, time-intensive, ahead-of-the-curve reporting on underreported beats. We operate on razor-thin margins in an unfathomably hard news business, and can’t afford to come up short on these online goals. And given everything, reporting like ours is vital right now.

If you can afford to part with a few bucks, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones with a much-needed year-end donation. And please do it now, while you’re thinking about it—with fewer people paying attention to the news like you are, we need everyone with us to get there.

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