Georgia was one of the first states to reopen, and since then it’s had several “oops” moments as the data it releases has turned out to be wrong in various crude and obvious ways—all of which, by coincidence, make the state look better than it really is. I don’t really care too much about that, though, because I don’t trust much of anything these days other than death rates, which are hard to manipulate. (Not impossible, but hard.) So let’s take a look at that:

So far I don’t see much of anything happening. Daily deaths look to be on a modest downward trend for the past month, probably due to the lockdown that was in place until mid-April. Starting on May 12, however, it looks like death rates started to increase again, which is about what you’d expect if there’s a three-week lag between interventions ending and death rates starting to increase.

Still, it’s too early to tell what’s really happening. A month from now we’ll probably have a pretty good picture of how Georgia is doing.

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We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

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