COVID-19 Cases Are Rising, Especially in Trump Country

The Washington Post says that Donald Trump is bullish on our recovery from COVID-19:

The president is betting his political future on convincing voters that a recent dip in coronavirus cases, hospitalizations and deaths signals a coming end to the national nightmare — and is a reason to reassess his handling of the pandemic and vote for him. He is zigzagging the country for a series of packed events, sometimes indoors, always with a packed and mostly unmasked crowd, preaching that the situation is rapidly improving while largely ignoring a death toll that this week surpassed 200,000 Americans amid fears that the country could have a second wave as temperatures drop.

I don’t get it. What dip in cases could he be thinking of?

New cases have been rising for the past two weeks, from 34,000 per day on September 13 to 43,000 today. And guess where things are worst?

The number of new Covid-19 infections in rural America jumped by 30% last week, reversing a short-lived decline in new cases and putting a record number of rural counties on the red-zone list. New deaths from Covid-19 also grew last week, increasing by 20% and bringing the total number of rural Americans who have died as a result of the pandemic to 18,128…The number of rural counties on the red-zone list climbed to 909 last week. The previous record was set the first week of September, when 806 rural counties were on the list.

These are Trump’s people. But who are they going to believe, Trump or their own eyes? Unfortunately, I have a feeling we all know the answer to that.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT.

We have a considerable $390,000 gap in our online fundraising budget that we have to close by June 30. There is no wiggle room, we've already cut everything we can, and we urgently need more readers to pitch in—especially from this specific blurb you're reading right now.

We'll also be quite transparent and level-headed with you about this.

In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

You're here for reporting like that, not fundraising, but one cannot exist without the other, and it's vitally important that we hit our intimidating $390,000 number in online donations by June 30.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. It's going to be a nail-biter, and we really need to see donations from this specific ask coming in strong if we're going to get there.

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