Coronavirus daily update: Tuesday, May 19

Waiting for Elon Musk

Big news out of the Triad today is an effort to entice Elon Musk to build a Tesla plant at the Greensboro-Randolph Megasite. Said effort involved flying an airplane over the existing Tesla facility in Fremont, Calif., pulling a banner that read: “TESLA COME TO NC. WE WANT YOU @GRMEGASITE.”

Tesla, of course, is a world leader in electric cars, solar energy and other technological innovations. And a plane pulling a banner is the same way they advertised the 1939 World’s Fair.

I say we should have gone all the way and gotten a skywriter. Or maybe send a singing telegram.

No word from Musk as of press time.

Some news

• Here we are on the cusp of Phase 2, which could begin as soon as Friday — though the numbers may indicate otherwise. More on that in a bit. And we’re still reckoning with a wave of cancellations.
• Guilford County will not be opening any of its swimming pools for the Memorial Day Weekend. In Forsyth County, Tanglewood pool will not open. Winston-Salem and Greensboro pools will remain closed as well.
• The NC Folk Festival has teamed up with the Carolina Blues Festival, which was to be held last weekend. The presser says that the CBF will be folded into the NCFF, which is scheduled for Sept. 11-13, but it is unclear what that will look like. NFF organizers promise a “modified” version of the event, though no bookings have been announced on the website.
• Another prisoner has died of COVID-19 at the federal prison in Butner.
• Winston-Salem, which has been named No. 5 on a NY Times list titled, “Where Outbreaks Might Come Next,” a doctor told the governor that patients in Winston-Salem had spoken of “herd-immunity” parties, the point of which is to get everyone infected so they can all get sick and develop the antibodies.
  • Don’t do this, lest you become one of the numbers.

The numbers

• You can say that Forsyth County is not doing a great job containing the virus, or you can say that increased testing has merely revealed more existing cases. But you cannot deny that the numbers are escalating. Forty new cases hit today in Forsyth, making the official count 738 and climbing. This chart lists 596 cases still active.
• Guilford County has 904 total today, 32 new ones, with 384 recoveries (25 new ones), 159 hospitalizations (up 14) and 49 deaths (up two). There are 312 unaccounted for here — neither recovered, nor hospitalized, nor deceased. They are suffering at home.
• The state DHHS site is soft on daily hard numbers, so let’s go with N&O: We’ve added 677 new cases — a big day — and we have added 30 deaths in North Carolina. That makes 691 of us so far.
• Testing has leveled off at about 9,000 per day. We’ve completed 265,008. 10 million to go.

A diversion

In honor of our overture to Elon Musk, I submit a genuine Greensboro hero: World War II flying Ace George Preddy, the best P-51 Mustang pilot who ever worked the joystick, or however that works. I don’t know where this documentary came from, who made it or when, but it’s. a fairly exhaustive study of the man, his abilities and his time in Greensboro.

Program notes

• I’m getting my public-domain images from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City these days. We just call it “the Met.” Tonight we’ve got “Two Men Contemplating the Moon” — by Caspar David Friedrich, 1825-30.
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