FiveThirtyEight’s top stories this week

A [FiveThirtyEight]( email [Popular This Week] Sunday, April 12, 2020 [1. Coronavirus Case Counts Are Meaningless*]( [CASE-COUNT-4×3]( If you follow me on Twitter, you’ll know I’m constantly going on about how the number of COVID-19 cases is not a very useful indicator of anything — unless you also know something about how tests are being conducted. [Read more]( [2. Why Bernie Sanders Lost]( [Democratic Presidential Candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders Speaks To The Media In Burlington, Vermont]( There is a simple explanation for why Sen. Bernie Sanders, who officially suspended his presidential campaign on Wednesday, lost the Democratic nomination: Former Vice President Joe Biden trounced the Vermont senator when the race narrowed to a one-on-one contest after Super Tuesday. The results of the caucuses and primaries before and on Super Tuesday left Sanders trailing Biden by 83 pledged delegates — a significant, but perhaps not insurmountable, deficit. But the Vermont senator lost eight of the 11 contests after Super Tuesday, winning only North Dakota, the Northern Mariana Islands and among Democrats who are American citizens but living abroad. Moreover, many of Biden’s wins were blowouts, ballooning his pledged delegate lead to 311, a margin that is essentially insurmountable. [Read more]( [3. Sanders — And The Media — Learned The Wrong Lessons From Trump In 2016]( [USA-ELECTION-SANDERS-4×3-1]( “The […] pitch is a mix of idealism and a shouting anger about the system, but at its heart is a hard-nosed math: He’s the only candidate with a sizable chunk of the electorate that won’t waver, no matter what, so a field that keeps growing and splitting support keeps making things easier.” [Read more]( [4. Dr. Fauci Has Been Dreading A Pandemic Like COVID-19 For Years]( [President Donald J. Trump]( Last year, before the COVID-19 pandemic created quarantines, surging unemployment and packed hospitals, I interviewed Dr. Anthony Fauci. Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, is now essentially omnipresent as part of the White House coronavirus task force. But in the spring of 2019, with COVID-19 nowhere on the horizon, he still had the time to speak with me for over an hour about vaccines. Recently, I was plumbing through my archives and found an excerpt of the interview that stopped me in my tracks. [Read more]( [5. Here’s What Voters Told Us About Voting In Wisconsin’s Primary]( [Wisconsin Election Proceeds Despite Stay-At-Home Order During Coronavirus Pandemic]( Amid the global coronavirus outbreak and over the objections of a governor who tried to stop in-person voting at the last minute, Wisconsin held its election Tuesday for the Democratic presidential nomination, the state Supreme Court and several local offices. We won’t have actual results until Monday at the earliest, but at this point, we do know that the election experienced a number of setbacks. [Read more]( [6. Science Has No Clear Answers On The Coronavirus. Face Masks Are No Exception.]( [Italy Continues Coronavirus Lockdown As Death Toll Exceeds 10,000]( Over the course of the last week, America somehow went from being a country where very few people were willing to wear masks for health … to one where regular people are trading mask-making patterns like sourdough starter. [Read more]( [7. Did Sanders Blow It For The Democratic Left? Or Was The Nomination Always Out Of Reach?]( [BernieSanders]( There was Jesse Jackson in 1988 and Bill Bradley in 2000. There was Howard Dean in 2004 and Bernie Sanders in 2016. Candidates running as liberal or populist alternatives to more center-left, establishment candidates have often lost in Democratic primaries. And while the party has shifted left on policy and some of its most compelling figures (Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Sen. Elizabeth Warren) are very liberal, the center left has generally won head-to-head battles with the left over the last four years, whether the battlefield was policy debates on Capitol Hill or congressional and gubernatorial primaries. So in late December it seemed likely that former Vice President Joe Biden was on course to win the nomination — a fairly unsurprising outcome, as he is the kind of center-left establishment candidate Democrats often choose. [Read more]( [8. What The Heck Is Going On With Wisconsin’s Primary?]( [EU-0406-4×3]( UPDATE (April 6, 2020, 7:32 p.m.): On Monday, Gov. Tony Evers issued an executive order attempting to postpone in-person voting for Wisconsin’s April 7 election to June 9; however, Republican legislators successfully challenged the order in the Wisconsin Supreme Court. So as of Monday evening, Wisconsin will be going to the polls on Tuesday. [Read more]( [9. Democratic And GOP Governors Enacted Stay-At-Home Orders On The Same Timeline. But All Holdouts Are Republicans.]( [Governor Andrew Cuomo Press Conference in New York, US]( Republican governors have been widely criticized for being slower than their Democratic counterparts in imposing social distancing requirements to halt the spread of the new coronavirus. Some Democratic governors — Govs. Gavin Newsom (California), Andrew Cuomo (New York), J.B. Pritzker (Illinois) and Jay Inslee (Washington) in particular — moved to enact social distancing measures relatively early, in some cases weeks ahead of other states. But this hasn’t been an entirely partisan push — Republican Gov. Mike DeWine (Ohio) also enacted social distancing measures early, declaring “we must be at war” with the virus. [Read more]( [10. Is The Economy Still The Most Important Thing For Trump’s Reelection?]( [White House Coronavirus Task Force Speaks To The Media In Daily Briefing]( The U.S. economy lost 700,000 jobs in March, while more than 10 million Americans filed unemployment claims. The economy is tumbling in the wake of the coronavirus, and now there’s a very real possibility that we’re on the verge of a recession. [Read more]( --------------------------------------------------------------- Weekly Listen [Play]( [Politics Podcast: Wisconsin’s Election Is A Mess]( [FiveThirtyEight] [View in browser]( [ABC News]( [Unsubscribe]( Our mailing address: FiveThirtyEight, 47 West 66th Street, New York, NY 10023.