Coronavirus daily update: Monday, Aug. 3

A news break, not a newsbreak

Can we just not, with the news, for just one day?

It’s my business to stay informed, so I spend most days elbow-deep in the news cycle: reading, analyzing, comparing. Often I take the choicest tidbits and drop them here, in my daily update.

But the news cycle is making me mad, in the Shakespearean sense as opposed to the Vin Diesel sense, and I just can’t force myself to look at this shitshow today.

So let’s go straight to the numbers, which, dare I say, seem promising.

The numbers

• We are on a downward trend! In a good way!
• We’ve got four straight days of declining case numbers in North Carolina, and that is good news. The 1,313 new ones reported today (126,532 total) are the lowest daily total we’ve seen since July 20.
  • Hospital count is down, too, at 1,057.
  • Our positive-test rate has dropped to 7 percent.
  • New recovery numbers: 105,093 (83.05 percent), with 2,005 deaths (1.58 percent).
• Guilford County has added just 42 cases since Friday. 5,113 total, 142 deaths (2.77 percent) and 2,788 recoveries (54.52 percent).
• Forsyth County adds 122 over the weekend for 4,995. 3,380 have recovered (67.67 percent). Still 48 deaths (0.96 percent).

A diversion

I went down the Ted Knight rabbithole today. Knight, of course, was famous for playing blowhards, most notably in “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” where he playeds weatherman Ted Baxter, and Caddyshack, where he played the asshole judge. But I learned that Knight worked as a ventriloquist after World War II, that he had a small role as a cop in Hitchcock’s Psycho and that he could sing. I had also forgotten that his hit 1980s show “Too Close for Comfort” morphed, in 1986, to “The Ted Knight Show,” where he retired from the Cosmic Cow comic strip and ran a weekly newspaper. I’ve got one of the episodes here — looks like it may be the only one on YouTube. It totally does not age well, but it’s useful as a cultural study.

Program notes

• Tonight’s featured image is “Wheat Fields with Cypresses,” a Van Gogh from 1889 that no doubt, looks much more spectacular in person. Taken from the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s public-domain collection.
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