Coronavirus daily update: Tuesday, Sept. 22

Splendid isolation

I suppose I’ve grown used to it.

My day starts later than it used to — I no longer require daily grooming, I haven’t ironed a shirt in more than a month and we don’t have to get kids ready for school, don’t have to pack lunches, don’t have to drop them off and pick them up.

I’m working by 8 almost every day, posted up at the kitchen table and keeping all my plates spinning. I pause around 11 a.m., when my daughter emerges from her bedroom/classroom for lunch, and them I’m back at it until everything is checked off my list. Sometimes I think I’m working a lot more than I did when I went into the office every day. Sometimes I think I’m working a lot less. The truth, as always, lies somewhere in the middle.

I rarely go anywhere besides the gas station, where I buy cigarettes and fill the tank once or twice a month, and the grocery store, still a weekly chore, slathering with hand-sanitizer after every trip. And where my life was once an infinite series of personal encounters and exchanges out there in the world, it has become solitary — an endless loop from the bedroom to the kitchen to the desk to the yard.

Still, I think I’m making progress. And it seems, out there, the world is coming to terms with the coronavirus as well.

Some news

• Gov. Cooper has announced that stadiums and other outdoor venues may open next week, on Oct. 2. Venues with more than 10,000 capacity may fill 7 percent of their seats.
  • In the Triad, that includes college football fields at Wake Forest, A&T and Winston-Salem State (Bowman Gray Stadium), but not the White Oak Amphitheater (capacity 7,061).
• Speaking of which, Saturday’s Wake game against Notre Dame has been canceled due to a coronavirus cluster on Notre Dame’s team.
• Michael Jordan has started a NASCAR team, and hired Bubba Wallace as a driver.
• And in non-sports news, the US has surpassed 200,000 coronavirus deaths since March 4. By comparison, the flu killed almost 35,000 Americans in the 2018-19 season. That eases us right into the numbers.

The numbers

• In North Carolina, a surge of 1,168 new cases brings us to 195,549 total. With 45 new deaths, we have 3,315 in the state.
  • That’s a 1.69 percent death rate, and it gives us about 1.7 percent of total US deaths, which I suppose is pretty good.
  • Positive test rate holds at 5.4 percent.
• Forsyth County adds 17 new cases for 6,850 — 6,290 recoveries (+48, 91.82 percent) and 95 deaths (+1, 1.39 percent).
• Guilford County sees 65 new cases for 8,259 total. Of those, 4,838 have recovered (58.58 percent) and 168 have died (2.03 percent).
  • Some crazy discrepancies between the Guilford and Forsyth coronavirus numbers, most especially hospitalizations — Guilford with 651 and Forsyth with just 24.

A diversion

So everybody’s watching “Cobra Kai,” which means they’re talking about Ralph Macchio, which means I should claim The Outsiders for today’s diversion. Instead, though, I expound on a recurring theme here at the diversion: movies that have been turned into TV shows, which almost never works, “MASH” notwithstanding. The Outsiders was, of course , a book by SE Hinton first published in 1967. The movie version came out in 1983. The TV series dropped in 1990, on Fox during the early days of the network. Here’s the pilot, with an intro by “Do the Bartman”-era Bart Simpson.

Program notes

• For tonight’s featured image, we’ve got “Snap the Whip,” by Winslow Homer, 1872. I’m on something of a Homer kick right now, which is fine: His body of work is outstanding and his use of light and shadow rivals any artist of his era. Taken from the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s public-domain collection. And hey: The Met is now open on Fifth Avenue in NYC, if you’re in town.
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