Good morning. 
Friday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of eighty-five. Sunrise is 5:33 AM and sunset 8:29 PM, for 14h 56m 14s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 11.5% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the one thousand three hundred forty-seventh day.
On this day in 1918, Bolshevik Chekists at the Ipatiev House in Yekaterinburg, Russia execute Czar Nicholas II and his immediate family and retainers.
Recommended for reading in full —
Alexis C. Madrigal writes A Second Coronavirus Death Surge Is Coming (‘There was always a logical explanation for why cases rose through the end of June while deaths did not’):
Despite political leaders trivializing the pandemic, deaths are rising again: The seven-day average for deaths per day has now jumped by more than 200 since July 6, according to data compiled by the COVID Tracking Project at The Atlantic. By our count, states reported 855 deaths today, in line with the recent elevated numbers in mid-July.
The deaths are not happening in unpredictable places. Rather, people are dying at higher rates where there are lots of COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations: in Florida, Arizona, Texas, and California, as well as a host of smaller southern states that all rushed to open up.
The deaths are also not happening in an unpredictable amount of time after the new outbreaks emerged. Simply look at the curves yourself. Cases began to rise on June 16; a week later, hospitalizations began to rise. Two weeks after that—21 days after cases rose—states began to report more deaths. That’s the exact number of days that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has estimated from the onset of symptoms to the reporting of a death.
Lena H. Sun and Amy Goldstein report Disappearance of covid-19 data from CDC website spurs outcry:
On the eve of a new coronavirus reporting system this week, data disappeared from a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website as hospitals began filing information to a private contractor or their states instead. A day later, an outcry — including from other federal health officials — prompted the Trump administration to reinstate that dashboard and another daily CDC report on the pandemic.
And on Thursday, the nation’s governors joined the chorus of objections over the abruptness of the change to the reporting protocols for hospitals, asking the administration to delay the shift for 30 days. In a statement, the National Governors Association said hospitals need the time to learn a new system, as they continue to deal with this pandemic.
The governors also urged the administration to keep the information publicly available.
The disappearance of the real-time data from the CDC dashboard, which was taken down Tuesday night before resurfacing Thursday morning, was a ripple effect of the administration’s new hospital reporting protocol that took effect Wednesday, according to a federal health official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.
Without receiving the data firsthand, CDC officials were reluctant to maintain the dashboard — which shows the number of patients with covid-19, the disease caused by the virus, and hospital bed capacity — and took it down, the federal health official said. The CDC dashboard states that its information comes directly from hospitals and does not include data submitted to “other entities contracted by or within the federal government.” It also says the dashboard will not be updated after July 14.
Why We Haven’t Had Supersonic Commercial Jets Since the Concorde: