Dr. Fauci revises his numbers, and the Coronavirus Truthers revise their meaning

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the epidemiologist whom Donald Trump was only the most recent president to rely on (sometimes) for expert advice, says that social distancing is working so well that he's revising his estimate of the number of deaths this pandemic will cause in the United States from between 100,000 to 240,000 to 60,000.

Naturally, the Coronavirus Truthers are already using this evidence that the restrictions they've been insisting all along weren't needed have saved about 40,000 lives as an argument that the threat was overblown all along and they weren't actually needed.

As somebody once said, one can't reason people out of what they were never reasoned into in the first place. But the right's reflexive pooh-poohing of the experts and the facts, while it may have its origin in a desire to justify President Trump's dilatory response to the threat, seems to have spilled over into other people with no particular desire to bail our Self-Appointed-Greatest-Expert-On-Everything out on his lethal dropping of the ball. Maybe it's just a desire to continue to believe previously useful conservative media outlets (not Fox News, of course, which long ago ceased to be useful to anyone but the man in the Oval Office and his sycophants) even though many of them have gone full Alex Jones to establish that COVID-19 is just the sniffles.

I continue to be disappointed in the way conservatives are responding to things these days. It seems like The Donald as managed to confuse even conservatives who make a conscious effort to continue thinking for themselves. But in the meantime, outlets like Powerlineblog and The Federalist are going to have a hard time going forward being taken seriously by anyone but loyal customers who react to their current indiscretions more or less the way Republicans generally react to... well, pretty much any damnfool thing Donald Trump says or does.

But the very people who, if they had had their way, would have ratcheted the death toll way past the 100,000 mark are now citing the very success of the strategy they decry as evidence that it was never needed to begin with. And the danger remains that President Trump and his crowd of ignoramuses may manage to get segments of the population to relax their vigilance at the very hour that we may be on the verge of success and cause those numbers to revert to Dr. Fauci's original predictions.

And we may very well be on the verge of success. The tide seems to have turned in New York. True, Chicago, Detroit, New Orleans, and other great American cities probably have yet to experience their darkest hour. But the best guess is that nationally, both the death toll and the demand on the healthcare system may peak on April 16, and the current crisis may be over by the end of May.

That is if Mr. Trump doesn't manage to get enough people to take their foot off the brakes before then to make the curve less flat.

We seem to have a shot at not overwhelming the healthcare system completely due, as Dr. Fauci made clear in his statement, to the success we're having in holding down the immediate number of cases through social distancing. Old COVID-19 may well return when the leaves begin to change color; second waves of pandemics tend to follow about that time of year. But hopefully this time, unlike 1919, the second wave will only be a bump in the road, and we'll all manage to get to the polls in time to hold Mr. Trump accountable.