Who knew? Certainly not the COVID cheerleaders on the Left. But a sizable study at a Detroit-area health system found that the drug hydroxychloroquine “significantly” reduced the death rate of its coronavirus patients who received treatment with the drug.

As the Detroit News reports, “The study analyzed 2,541 patients hospitalized among the system’s six hospitals between March 10 and May 2 and found 13% of those treated with hydroxychloroquine died while 26% of those who did not receive the drug died.”

Hydroxychloroquine has, of course, become a battlefield for the Left ever since President Donald Trump began promoting the drug as a safe and promising potential treatment for the Chinese coronavirus. Thus, a bad day became even worse for the drug’s detractors when the study, which was published in the International Society of Infectious Disease, also found no heart-related side effects from the drug — an issue that the Left has latched onto and repeated ad nauseam despite hydroxychloroquine’s more than half-century of success as a safe anti-malaria drug.

Even CNN had to acknowledge the news, albeit in the most grudging terms possible: “A surprising new study found the controversial antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine helped patients better survive in the hospital. But the findings, like the federal government’s use of the drug itself, were disputed.”

Translation: “Some study said Trump’s drug helps, but don’t you believe it. Things are still bad.”

All of this is of a piece with the mainstream media’s reporting on the coronavirus pandemic — and the Left’s all-consuming efforts to keep the American people from feeling even a wee bit better about things until Wednesday, November 4 — the day after they’ve voted Orange Man Bad out of office.

Johns Hopkins has some revealing data from the past month: From June 7 through July 5, coronavirus cases are up 134%, as we predicted when our nation began to reopen and return to some semblance of normalcy. But deaths are down a remarkable 39%, which is probably reflective of both the lower average age of those infected and the improved ability of our healthcare system to treat them. (Yes, death is a lagging indicator with coronavirus, but not that lagging. And in general, we’ve simply become more conscious of social distancing and better at protecting the elderly and others in high-risk groups.)

Even the CDC’s website notes that COVID deaths have continued to decrease as a percentage of total U.S. deaths and may even slip below the CDC’s threshold for definition as an epidemic. Again, we caution about death being a lagging indicator, but that trend is good news.

Still, there’s been an overriding smugness among leftists, as states with Republican governors such as Florida, Texas, and Arizona have seen their cases spike — almost as if they’re wishing for the worst. But as National Review’s David Harsanyi points out, the Left has nothing to gloat about: “To this point, 71 percent more Americans have died in New York nursing homes than have died in the entire state of Florida, which not only has a larger population but a population that skews older. To this point, New York’s death rate has been ten times larger than Florida’s.”

Finally, as Fox News reports, “Several big-city [read: Democrat] mayors and top officials are acknowledging that weeks of anti-police protests and riots may have contributed to surging coronavirus rates, weeks after Democrats and even some epidemiologists openly encouraged Black Lives Matter allies to demonstrate in the streets.”

So much for the Left’s belief that it has all the answers — and that the CDC’s rules don’t apply to social-justice warriors.