Coronavirus daily update: Tuesday, Aug. 4

Action from the home office

I’ve been businessing all day — communicating with staff, laying in plans for quarters 3 and four, grinding on emails and making decisions. I have one more to make, and I’m pushing it until the last minute.

Tomorrow, the footage of John Neviiile’s last hours of life at the Forsyth County jail become available to the media. This comes only after a court action brought by a consortium of media properties forced its exposure, a group that includes the Raleigh News & Observer, the Winston-Salem Journal, WRAL, the New York Times and the Daily Beast. And the footage will only be released to those outlets, at the same time, tomorrow morning.

Because Triad City Beat was not initially invited to the party, we have been given a late opportunity to join up, allowing us the same early access to this footage, which is surely in the public interest and very definitely in our coverage area. But we’d have to kick in for the lawyers, which is not something we’ve budgeted for this year. It’s not an insurmountable sum, but it’s a lot.

So do we pony up and get the early footage, which will no doubt bring clicks and eyeballs, and ultimately a greater understanding to the sad story of John Neville? Or do we save our resources for another day, another stopry that might not benefit from so much heavyweight coverage?

I’ll be thinking about this all night. At least it will keep my mind off the numbers.

The numbers

• A slight uptick gives us 1,629 new cases today in NC, 128,161 total.
  • Hospitalizations jumped to 1,166, up 109 today.
  • We’ve got 2,036 deaths now, breaking the 2K mark.
• Guilford County adds 123 new cases, making 5,236 total, with 2,885 recoveries and 149 deaths. There’s demographics data at the link.
• Forsyth County has 52 new cases (5,007, breaking the 5K mark for the first time) and one new death (49).
  • Chrome is blocking me from the Forsyth County website, using some alarming language.

A diversion

It’s true: Comedy generally does not age well. Every try to watch “Welcome Back Kotter,” which was a huge hit show in the 1970s? It’s unwatchable. Likewise with a lot of dated material, that seems stiff, formalized or offensive. But some of it, like Charlie Chaplin, holds up. Chaplin, who relied so much on physical humor and subtlety of expression, still makes me laugh. And so do the Marx Brothers, but for different reasons. I like the rapid-fire one-liners, the amateurish production of the early work and obvious chemistry between the brothers, who actually were brothers. Tonight I’ve got A Night in Casablanca, made in 1946, after the brothers retired. Groucho convinced them to come back and make a couple more pictures because he needed the money.

Program notes

• Tonight’s featured image is “Joan of Arc,” by Jules Bastien-Lepage in 1879. The image depicts the saint at the moment of her conversion. Taken from the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s public-domain collection.
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