Coronavirus daily update: Tuesday, Dec. 15

Tuesdays are the worst

If you’re like me — scared shitless of the coronavirus and largely confined to the house for the last, oh I don’t know, nine months — Tuesdays are the worst. It feels like the week’s barely gotten started, the tasks are piled up on the list and it’s hard, again for me, to find the groove.

Gov. Cooper got on TV today to talk about the vaccine and our state’s 85,800 doses (as opposed to two-dose shits, as previously reported). Surely they’re gone by now; we find out Friday when we get more, and how many that will be.

Herd immunity sets in, theoretically, when 70 percent of North Carolinians have antibodies, either through having the coronavirus or the vaccine. Applying math: 446,601 cases in NC, 5,881 dead — 440,720 plus the 85,800 vaccinated makes 526,520, roughly 5.26 percent of the state’s 10 million or so people.

This is a start.

Meanwhile, the numbers continue to pile up.

The numbers

• 5,236 new ones in NC today. Running totals have been mentioned previously.
  • If the state is not going to keep its county-by-county alert system up to date, why even bother having it?
  • A jump in hospitalizations: 2,735.
  • 10.9 positive test rate.
• Guilford County adds 350 for 18,301. No new deaths (286), 15,500 recoveries.
  • 2,531 current cases, 198 of them hospitalized.
• Forsyth County continues to provide more on its Facebook page than the county site. There we find 250 new cases for 17,035, with 189 deaths and 13,594 recoveries.
  • 3,252 active cases, 44 of them hospitalized.

A diversion

Like everyone else in my Intro to Communications class in college, I thought the first “talkie” after the Silent Era was The Jazz Singer. But the YouTube rabbithole led me to this little beauty from 1913, which predates Jolson’s piece by 13 years! It came out of Thomas Edison’s Menlo Park labs, archived by the Library of Congress, and it’s deeply formalized and weird.

Program notes

• “Portrait of a Man,” from Velázquez around 1650, looks how I feel today. Thanks to the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s public-domain collection.
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