Fox Business cut ties with Trish Regan on Friday evening, less than a month after she claimed in a monologue that President Donald Trump’s enemies were using the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19 as “yet another attempt to impeach the president.” Her unhinged rant went viral and swiftly came to personify the paranoid and propagandistic treatment of the story common on Fox Business and its sister network, Fox News.

But Regan’s sudden departure doesn’t indicate that Fox’s executives have suddenly switched gears, deciding that the current crisis demands they establish real standards for the network’s content. It simply shows that when a relatively unknown host came under fire and started drawing attention to the broader problems at Fox, they were willing to cut her loose to salvage the network’s reputation. And you can tell Fox’s other personalities know the network hasn’t drawn a new line, because their commentary hasn’t changed. Over the past few days, they’ve continued to promote fever-swamp conspiracy theories about the virus, lavish praise on Trump’s response, and lash out at his perceived foes.

On Sunday night -- just two days after Regan’s removal -- viewers of Fox News’ The Next Revolution were treated to a credulous discussion of whether videos posted on social media showing empty hospital parking lots may indicate that reporting on the virus has been overstated.

“You can see it on Twitter,” Sara Carter, a Fox contributor who frequently appears on Sean Hannity’s program as an “investigative reporter,” told host Steve Hilton. “People are saying, ‘Film your hospital,’ people are driving by their hospitals and they're not seeing -- in the ones that I'm seeing -- they're not seeing anybody in the parking lots. They're not seeing anybody drive up.”

“So, people are wondering what's going inside the hospital,” she continued. “How many people are actually in the hospitals that are suffering from coronavirus, how many ventilators, are the ICUs really being filled, how full are they, what's happening in my hometown?”

The “film your hospital” hashtag Carter cited on Fox is being used by conspiracy-minded right-wing activists to share videos of their local hospitals that they claim debunk media coverage that such hospitals are overcrowded with COVID-19 patients (in fact, the relatively empty parking lots are likely the result of visitor restrictions). One such video of the parking lot of a New York City hospital, produced by former Fox contributor Todd Starnes, has been viewed millions of times.

Carter also tweeted about the fringe campaign on Sunday night, deleting her tweet after I called attention to it Monday morning.