Free Republic

More than 95 percent of U.S. counties are now seeing “high” rates of COVID-19 transmission, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The CDC's COVID Data Tracker revealed on Tuesday that 95.19 percent of counties in the U.S. are seeing a “high” rate of transmission, meaning there were at least 100 new cases reported per 100,000 people in the past seven days. Around 2 percent of counties are seeing “substantial” and “low” rates of transmission, and less than one percent of counties are seeing “moderate” rates of transmission.

Only one Pennsylvania county is demonstrating substantial spread of COVID-19, Gov. Tom Wolf’s office said Tuesday. Wyoming County is the only county in the commonwealth with high transmission of the coronavirus, according to Wolf’s office. The number of counties with high transmission has dropped dramatically in recent weeks. Last week, five counties showed substantial spread of the coronavirus, Wolf’s office said. Just three weeks ago, 40 of the state’s 67 counties were still showing substantial transmission. The percentage of positive COVID-19 tests dropped to 3.8% for the week of May 21-27, down from 4.5% the previous week. It’s the sixth...

Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf will announce the first group of counties expected to move into the yellow phase of coronavirus mitigation Friday afternoon, his office confirmed. A press release from Wolf's office said he and Pennsylvania Secretary of Health Dr. Rachel Levine will provide an update on coronavirus in the state at 2 p.m.

Three years after a presidential election that came down to 77,000 votes in three Midwestern battlegrounds, Democrats and Republicans are eyeing a much larger battlefield ahead of the 2020 contests, one that stretches from the picturesque coastline of rural Maine to the high desert of Arizona. Both President Trump’s campaign and the Democrats vying to replace him are scrutinizing a political map in flux, one in which attitudes and alignments are shifting and new regions are coming into play.As many as a dozen states could be up for grabs next year as economic and international uncertainty pairs with a cauldron...

The majority of murders in the U.S. occur in only a small percentage of counties across the country. The Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC) said in a new report that there is a “geographical concentration” of murders, with 68 percent of killings occurring in just 5 percent of the nation’s counties. The homicides also tend to be concentrated to relatively small pockets of those counties, the report said.