Coronavirus Growth in Western Countries: June 15 Update

Here’s the coronavirus death toll through June 15. Mexico is spiking back up a bit, while the United States continues its slow crawl to 2 deaths per million. We’re roughly following the path of Sweden and the UK, lagged by a week or two. That’s not great, but then again, I never expected us to decline this far regardless of how long it took. So this is good news overall, but as I’m sure you all know, there are a whole bunch of states that have high and rising death counts following the reopening. It may be only a matter of time before those states swamp the others and push our overall mortality rate higher.

OPERATIONAL NOTE: When I first started doing these charts, the folks at Johns Hopkins published their final daily data at around 6 pm Pacific time. That was great. I’d update my charts before dinner and schedule them to appear the next morning. However, a while back it became 8 pm. Then 9 pm. Yesterday it was 10 pm. If this keeps up, I’m going to give up doing them the night before and instead update them first thing in the morning. Since I’m a pretty variable riser these days, this means they’ll appear at variable (but later) times than they do now. I’ll keep you posted if this happens.

The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here. The Public Health Agency of Sweden is here.

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

If you can, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones—that exists to make a difference, not a profit—with a donation of any amount today. We need more donations than normal to come in from this specific blurb to help close our funding gap before it gets any bigger.

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