Fox News is continuing its effort to declare victory in the country’s struggle to get through the coronavirus pandemic, pointing to continued downward revisions in the projected death count to argue that the regular economy should be reopened. In fact, those downward revisions are happening precisely because of the social distancing measures that Fox commentators want to start peeling back.

The initial, nightmarish figure of a potential 2.2 million deaths in the U.S. due to the coronavirus was based on a hypothetical projection in which no great preventative measures were taken. With actions put in place, that number plummeted to a still horrific 100,000 to 240,000 deaths. Now, as a CNN report from Wednesday explained, “the model [has] predicted the virus will kill 60,000 people in the United States over the next four months”:

Fox’s prime-time lineup is now turning this into an opportunity to not only urge a relaxation of the stay-at-home orders and other economic controls, but to question the models themselves.

On the Wednesday night edition of Tucker Carlson Tonight, the eponymous host — who has bemoaned the whole notion of relying on scientific expertise for policy guidance in the pandemic — used these downward revisions to declare that the models had “got it wrong.” And while it appears that social distancing is working even better than expected, Carlson construed this to claim that “social distancing measures were factored into the model from the beginning,” but that some other factor had “skewed the numbers,” and “we should find out” what it was.

Sean Hannity touted: “No state has experienced a surge anywhere near what was told and expected. … Now, while we continue to fight COVID-19, this country must also harness its ingenuity, its brilliance, the free market system, and figure a way to get Americans safely back to work as soon as possible, where they want to be. You can't allow America's businesses to wither on the vine and die.”

Laura Ingraham also claimed that the models were clearly wrong:

And continuing into Thursday morning, Fox & Friendsvco-host Brian Kilmeade mocked the prior warnings from scientists.

“The fact is, when someone says ‘200,000 people’d die, oops, I mean 60,000.’ And it's not going to be right away, it's going to be in August,” Kilmeade said. “That's how good we are doing and how off the models were. You have to wonder, as much as social distancing is working, I wonder if the economists are going to get in that room and say we have to stand up this economy in some way before we're not going to be able to stand when this is all said and done.”

At that point, even his show co-host Steve Doocy could only reply: “Right, but Brian, it's still 60,000 people, which is a staggering number.”

Already, there have been over 14,000 confirmed deaths from COVID-19 in the United States — and that number is likely being undercounted from a lack of testing capacity even in cases where a person had clearly shown symptoms.

Over at Fox News and other right-wing media outlets, however, there has been a concerted effort to claim that the numbers are being inflated. According to them, the numbers are inflated because the COVID-19 death tally includes people who tested positive but also had some other underlying health condition that the virus could have simply exacerbated.

This sort of logic might seem equivalent to stipulating that a person was pushed off a cliff but suggesting they might have really died from a heart attack on the way down. And it is being used to continue a campaign of media denialism that could cause serious danger to the public — thanks to the network’s appeal to one specific viewer, President Donald Trump.