Happy Thursday! The Dispatch’s first-rate fact checker, Alec Dent, not only published two Dispatch Fact Checks yesterday (and had a third featured in White House trade adviser Peter Navarro’s bizarre USA Today op-ed attacking Dr. Anthony Fauci), but he “went viral” for the very first time, racking up more than 30,000 likes on his tweet about the coordinated Twitter hacks yesterday.

Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories

• As of Wednesday night, 3,499,291 cases of COVID-19 have been reported in the United States (an increase of 67,717 from yesterday) and 137,419 deaths have been attributed to the virus (an increase of 953 from yesterday), according to the Johns Hopkins University COVID-19 Dashboard, leading to a mortality rate among confirmed cases of 3.9 percent (the true mortality rate is likely much lower, between 0.4 percent and 1.4 percent, but it’s impossible to determine precisely due to incomplete testing regimens). Of 42,521,027 coronavirus tests conducted in the United States (756,470 conducted since yesterday), 8.2 percent have come back positive.

• Several large national retailers, including Walmart and grocery giant Kroger, are beginning to require customers to wear masks to shop in their stores nationwide.

• A pair of new national presidential polls bring grim news for President Trump: A new Quinnipiac poll shows Joe Biden with a 15-point lead over the incumbent, 52-37 percent, while the latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal survey gives Biden an 11-point edge, 51-40 percent. Biden’s lead now stands at just more than 9 percent in FiveThirtyEight’s polling average.