One of the most persistent mysteries of the COVID-19 pandemic in the U.S. is why cases have largely plateaued (until the last couple weeks) while mortality figures have fallen substantially. As we’ve discussed, there’s been an ongoing debate about disentangling the evolving case counts from the ongoing rise in the number of tests being conducted every day. But particularly as cases started to rise in June it is clear that cases are growing well in excess of what can be explained by more testing. So why have the daily mortality numbers dropped? Why the disjuncture between the two numbers, even taking into account a two- or three-week lag between spikes in new cases and people succumbing to the disease?

We interrupt our regular programming for an unsolicited testimonial from TPM Reader JD:

TPM Reader MD writes in with his personal account of the St. Louis protest that featured the gun-waving Bonnie and Clyde in front of their “Midwestern palazzo”:

Trump just re-tweeted images of the gun-toting St. Louis couple, so this seems destined to become a national obsession. Might as well send you my two cents.

I was in St. Louis last night. In fact, I attended the protest. Let me give you a play-by-play.

Here is a new source of COVID data I want to share with you: outbreak.info. There are a lot of these sites and I try to dig into just who is running them and what standards they’re using for their data. This one appears to be the work of a team headed up by Andrew Su at the Scripps Research Center Institute in La Jolla. A lot of the data is what you find at other great sites like The COVID Tracking Project, the Johns Hopkins data site, etc. But this is a team specializing in bioinformatics. So they’ve worked on creating uniform formats for COVID data so the data can be efficiently and accurately meshed together – so the data can talk to each other.

Back in the days of now-Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s contentious Senate confirmation, the Washington Post killed a story that could’ve exposed a striking example of Kavanaugh’s public disingenuousness.

TPM Reader BL writes in to offer a clarification on the gun-toting couple in St. Louis. It’s potentially important context in a legal sense, but in the larger context I’m not so sure that armed residents of a Gilded Age knockoff of an Italian Renaissance palazzo defending their own private street patrolled by private security guards changes the essential meaning we can draw from this cartoonish encounter:

TPM Reader JO, a lawyer, reacts to this morning’s Supreme Court decision on stare decisis (and abortion, of course!):