Since June 19, when new cases in the United States went back over 30,000 in one day, we have been constantly bombarded with stories of how the virus is spiking" in "record" numbers in many of the states (like California, Texas, Florida and Arizona) that were not hit hard in the "first wave." Across the country, our number of new cases has indeed exploded to new levels during this time period ... and the news media, both at the national and local levels, have used these statistics to essentially create panic porn. The resulting public anxiety has caused several states to reverse their reopenings. Obviously the "new case" data point is both real and relevant, but it is also now extremely misleading. By incompetently using the same measure of what a "positive" virus test meant in April, to what it now means in July, the news media is in the process of, quite effectively, sabotaging America's recovery from this crisis. The data ... now makes it overwhelmingly obvious that nowhere near as many people who recently tested positive for the virus are going to die as did when this nightmare began. While the development has gotten scandalously little news coverage, the daily numbers of deaths with/of COVID has been declining with remarkable consistency for well over two months now. Sweden, a country much maligned in the media because they dared to not lock down by government mandate, has "new case" and "death" charts which look remarkably similar to ours. Their daily death rate has recently been down to single digits.