Good morning. 
Thursday in Whitewater will see morning rain give way to partly sunny skies, with a high of sixty-two. Sunrise is 5:48 AM and sunset 7:55 PM, for 14h 07m 17s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 45.7% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the one thousand two hundred sixty-ninth day.
On this day in 1973, President Richard Nixon announces that White House Counsel John Dean has been fired and that other top aides, most notably H. R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman, have resigned.
Recommended for reading in full —
Jayme Fraser, Daveen Rae Kurutz, Jessica Priest, and Kevin Crowe report Spike in US deaths and cases flagged as pneumonia suggest even greater COVID-19 impact:
Federal data released this week shows that the number of deaths recorded in the U.S. this year is higher than normal, outpacing deaths attributed to COVID-19 in states that have been hit hardest by the virus.
The data provides the first look at death trends this year across the country and offers more evidence that the official tally of coronavirus deaths is low.
The phenomenon is pronounced in states with some of the worst COVID-19 outbreaks. From March 22 to April 11, New York saw 14,403 more deaths than the average of the previous six years, according to data maintained by the National Center for Health Statistics at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. New Jersey saw an additional 4,439 deaths and Michigan an additional 1,572.
The “excess deaths” surpassed COVID-19 fatalities in those states by a combined 4,563 people. Experts suspect that unconfirmed coronavirus cases could be responsible for some of those deaths, but it might also be related to a shift in other causes of death. For example, some doctors speculate people might be dying from illnesses from which they would normally recover because the pandemic has changed access to health care.
Christine Neumann-Ortiz, executive director of Milwaukee’s Voces de la Frontera Action, writes in the New York Times that There Is a Better Way for Democrats to Win in Wisconsin:
We need the Democrats to run a new kind of campaign this year. Not just one that aggressively adapts to social distancing. But a campaign fueled by a different theory. For years, including in 2016, Democrats have relied heavily on expensive TV ads and traditional canvassing where paid staff members from out-of-state use out-of-date voter lists to contact people they don’t know and will never see again. This year, paid canvassers will likely shift to texting and phone calls.<
But this stranger-to-stranger approach won’t work for many Latinos who don’t appear on the voter rolls because they move often or vote infrequently. Or for those of us who would never open a door to a stranger who might turn out to be an agent from Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
My organization tried a different approach in 2018, one that works in the coronavirus era and gets better results. It’s based on leveraging relationships among people who already know one another, which data shows increases voter turnout more than any other single outreach method, including mail, TV and digital advertisements, and twice as much as contact from a stranger.
(One does not have to be a Democrat, as I am not, to see that Neumann-Ortiz’s electoral strategy is practical.)