Coronavirus daily update: Thursday, Sept. 3

BLM roundtable tonight

I’m plowing through the update tonight because we’re co-sponsoring an event with MUSE Winston-Salem: A roundtable discussion about Black Lives Matter, activism, social justice and the events of the last 100 days since George Floyd was murdered by Minneapolis police.

We’ve got four great panelists, moderated by our own Sayaka Matsuoka, and the whole thing kicks off on Facebook at 7 p.m. The event page is here.

So forgive me if I don’t have time to make a proper joke about Trump’s suggestion that North Carolinians vote twice in the upcoming election, which is a felony.

Oh, and the legislature passed a $1 billion coronavirus relief bill. I have not read it yet.

The numbers

• Today’s 1,656 new cases brings us to 172,209. But we have 2,806 deaths. Hospitalizations remain at a low 858, and our positive test rate is 7.6 percent.
• Forsyth County‘s 21 new cases makes 6,287. 5,521 recoveries, 82 deaths, 684 current cases.
• Guilford County adds 79 new cases for 7,042, of which 4,080 have recovered and 164 have died, leaving 2,798 remaining cases.

A diversion

The denizens of the round table at the Algonquin Hotel included Groucho Marx, Dorothy Parker, Irving Berlin and other writers, critics and luminaries between 1919 and 1929 — a “vicious circle” that both constructed and deconstructed social life in New York for those 10 years after World War I, which they just called the Great War. Here’s a doc, The Ten-Year Lunch, about the whole deal.

Program Notes

• For tonight’s featured image, we have “A Bit of War History: The Veteran,” by Thomas Waterman Wood, 1866. It’s the last of three in a series that depicts the man first as a slave, “The Contraband,” and then as a soldier in the Union army in “The Recruit.”. 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. Which is not very likely.
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