by Selwyn Duke, The New American:

“If only the media told the truth” sounds like a wish straight from the Wizard of Oz, desirable but fanciful. Many things would be different if it did, one being that we wouldn’t currently be crashing our economy and perhaps collapsing our civilization with the historic (and hysteric) blunder called “lockdown” policy. So asserted American Thinker’s Jack Hellner on Wednesday in a piece presenting the following startling facts:

• 1,603 counties (52%) of U.S [in] total have zero deaths

• 447 Counties (14%) of U.S. Total have one death

• 443 Counties (14%) of U.S. [in] total have two to five deaths

So 80 percent of American counties have five or fewer Wuhan coronavirus deaths, for a total of 2,662 out of our nation’s approximately 84,000 (an inflated number, do note) virus casualties — or just 3.2 percent of the total.

Yet they’re locked down just like the 20 percent of counties that have 96.8 percent of the total.

This is about as rational as insisting rural counties have the same number of traffic lights per square mile as New York City.

Despite this, supposed “experts and some Democrat governors are saying keep the economy in depression until we have a vaccine — which may never come,” writes Hellner. “If the public saw the truthful numbers, people would be glad to lead their free lives again.”

Note that no coronavirus vaccine has ever been created; one may be useless by the time it’s developed, as by then we may have achieved herd immunity or the virus may have mutated; and vaccines aren’t completely effective. For example, the CDC reported that the 2017-18-season flu vaccine was only 40 percent effective.

Hellner got his statistics from the Heritage Foundation, which, relating the infections’ concentrated nature, also tells us that as of May 4, just 10 states account for 70% of all U.S. cases and 77% of all deaths. Together, New York and New Jersey alone account for 38% of all cases and 48% of total COVID-19 deaths.

… As the first chart shows, the 30 counties with the most COVID-19 cases account for 50% of all the cases in the U.S. (and 57% of all deaths). That is, just 1% of the counties in the U.S. are responsible for half of the country’s coronavirus cases and more than half of the deaths.

Of those 30 counties, 24 are in the Northeast corridor between Philadelphia and Boston, the passageway served by a commuter railway system that runs through Manhattan. Overall, just 11% of the counties in the U.S. contain nearly 95% of all the COVID-19 deaths.

Now, question: If there were a disease mainly ravaging rural America, would state governments shut down the cities as part of the response?

Hellner also reminds us how “Dr. Deborah Birx said ‘there is nothing from the CDC that I can trust’” (video below) and that the CDC was, as Hellner paraphrases it, “inflating COVID 19 case rates by 25%.”

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