Coronavirus daily update: Wednesday, Aug. 19

Better late than never

One might think that, after five months of writing (mostly) nightly updates, it would have become an ingrained habit by now.

Not so.

After we put tomorrow’s newspaper to bed this afternoon, I went to Popeye’s with my daughter and closed my laptop, thinking I was finished for the day. But, of course, I was not. I remembered about an hour ago and I’ve been putting it off ever since.

Some news

• We’ve got some election stories in the paper this week: One on NC House District 59 and another on the Guilford Commission District 6.
• The editorial is a bit of a downer on the coronavirus era.
• A Greensboro police officer says he was dismissed because of his stance on George Floyd. The department says otherwise.
• Greg Lindberg, the guy Mike Causey turned in, just got sentenced to seven years for trying to bribe an elected official.
• More COVID-19 clusters at UNC-Chapel Hill and NC State. Carolina has suspended athletic activities for at least 24 hours.

The numbers

• 1,153 new cases in North Carolina today. That makes 147,932 total diagnoses, at least 127,749 of which have recovered. With 2,453 deaths that makes around 17,730 current cases.
  • 1,001 are in the hospital (5.65 percent).
  • We have issues almost 2 million tests in the state. Our positive-test rate today stands at 7 percent.
• Guilford County adds 60 more cases today to make 6,035. 3,605 have recovered (59.73 percent) and 154 have died (0.89 percent).
  • Roughly 2,276 active cases.
• Forsyth County adds 19 cases to make 5,620 total. 4,902 have recovered (87.54 percent) and two new deaths makes 62 (1.10 percent).
  • 656 active cases.

A diversion

I don’t know if 1970s comedian Andy Kaufman was a genius, a madman or both. In some ways his career followed a traditional trajectory — he did very strange stand-up which was co-opted for a role on a hit TV show. But much of his comedy was based on mining very uncomfortable moments, almost like he was fucking with his audience. Then he got into wrestling — in a very strange way. Here’s an hourlong episode of wrestling from Memphis in 1981, in which Kaufman takes over the rung and starts wrestling women from the audience.

Program notes

• Tonight’s featured image is “Martha Bartlett with Kitten,” a work from 1860 without benefit of an artist’s name. It’s the wrong shape for a feature photo, but I wanted to use it anyway because I think I love it. Taken from the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s public-domain collection.
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