Coronavirus daily update: Monday, May 18

Homemade oat milk

A couple months into the coronavirus era, it’s hard to find oat milk — along with flour, yeast, beef and a number of other staple ingredients — in the grocery stores and in the coffeeshops. I’m a half-and-half guy myself, but my wife likes it and the deprivations of the pandemic have made me resourceful and determined.

Using this recipe from the NY Times, I put a couple cups of oats in plan water and let them soak overnight. This morning, after I put a pork butt into the oven, I rinsed the oats and blended them with four cups of water, strained them and then threw in a little vanilla extract. Now I got oat milk (and also a slow-roasted pork butt and a load of bread that should be coming out of the oven around the same time). I could probably make a couple gallons of it for around $2.

Workarounds. Ingenuity. Stubbornness. Small victories. Most of are dealing with things these days as problems to be solved. And some days we’re having more success than others. It’s all a work in progress.

Some news

• Gov. Roy Cooper’s Phase 1 restrictions are set to expire on Friday at the earliest. He’s hopeful that we will hit our marks in terms of new cases, testing and tracing.
  • Phase 2 lifts the stay-at-home order except for “vulnerable” members of the populace.
  • It allows for reopening of bars, restaurants and entertainment venues, with reduced capacity.
  • Gatherings limits increase from 10 people to 25.
• The NC General Assembly reconvened today. No real business yet, but Senate Majority Leader Phil Berger held a presser this afternoon announcing a $4 billion budget shortfall.
  • That’s what happens with a consumption-based tax structure when nobody’s buying anything.
• The UNC Board of Governors meets Wednesday to discuss the fall semester, but at least two schools in the system — UNCG and NC A&T University — have made plans for students to come on campus in the fall.
• North Carolina’s last county to withstand the coronavirus has fallen. Avery County became the 100th, and last, in NC to report a COVID-19 case with one. It’s in the mountains on the Tennessee border.

The numbers

• It’s Monday, so we’ll start fresh: We’ve found 19,023 cases of COVID-19 in North Carolina since our first one on March 3, exactly 11 weeks ago.
  • At least 9,115 people have recovered, 511 hospitalized and 661 have died.
  • We’ve completed 255,755 COVID-19 tests.
• Guilford County clocks in today with 872 discovered cases — that’s about 100 in the last 48 hours.
  • 359 recoveries, 145 hosptalizations, 47 deaths.
• Forsyth County has 698 discovered cases, up 53 from yesterday.
  • 7 deaths, 95 recoveries.
• NC cases are increasing — check these Times graphs for the trend against other states — which does not bode well for Phase 2.

A diversion

A few months ago we discusses in this space George Orwell’s 1984, and how useful it is in the current circumstances. But I wold be remiss if I didn’t point you to the other pillar of the Orwell canon: Animal Farm. This one’s an allegory, and though the book itself is a slim volume that could be properly digested in a single day, despite what your eighth-grader says, the 1954 BBC animated film is two hours long. Totally worth a watch.

Program notes

• Public-domain images come from the Smithsonian Open Access. Tonight we’ve got “The Inverted Jenny” — one of a single, 100-sheet mistake by the US Post Office way back in 1918. Today the 24-cent stamp is worth about $1 million.
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