Coronavirus daily update: Friday, Aug. 7

The ascent

This week is like the first part of the rollercoaster, when you’re climbing to that first big rise and then, slowly at first, the care begin to drop. We’ve got colleges back in full swing across the state next week; we’ll be seeing decisions about fall professional and college sports — hopefully they do better than Major League Baseball, which is totally blowing it.

I’d say about a third of us in North Carolina are not participating in the pandemic — by which I mean ignoring safety protocols like masks and social distancing. Many believe that this is a ginned-up campaign issue designed to make Trump look bad, that it will disappear as soon as the election passes.

Wouldn’t that be something?

That would mean, of course, that these numbers I’m about to report are fake — along with all the numbers in every other nation on the planet. So I’ll just go ahead and report anyway.

The numbers

• NC saw a drop today — just 1,545 new ones, 132,812 total.
  • Our positive-test rate drops a point to 8 percent.
  • 41 new deaths, 2,156.
• Guilford County has 83 new cases, 5,513 total. No new deaths, 73 new recoveries (3,127)
• Forsyth County adds 57, for 5,148. One new death makes 52. 102 new recoveries for 3,853.

A diversion

I feel like if Frank Sinatra was still around, Donald Trump wouldn’t be so out of control. Sinatra was a god in Trump’d New York, and though his daughter Nancy recently revealed on Twitter that Sinatra hated Trump, I believe Trump would actually listen if Sinatra went to go have a talk with him. Here’s Frank before all that, in a 1957 episode called “The Frank Sinatra Show.” The guy was a total jerk, but what a talent.

Program notes

• Tonight’s featured image is “Peacable Kingdon,” by Edward Hicks, 1830-32. Taken from the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s public-domain collection.
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