Coronavirus daily update: Monday, June 29

An imperfect system

Apologies for the glitch in the system — I missed a couple days of updates: Friday because I was out covering a protest, and Saturday because I fell asleep on the couch.

But now I’m back, and as far as I’m concerned, right now the only news is the numbers.

The numbers

• Here’s some bad news from my time away: Friday we had 1,635 new cases of COVID-19 in NC. On Saturday we had 1,719. Sunday saw 1,605 new cases, which brings us to today’s total, which is 1,342.
  • This is a dramatic upturn in our 7-day average.
  • 63,484 total diagnoses. 45,538 recovered. 1,325 deaths. 16,621 outstanding, 843 of them hospitalized, 5.07 percent of them.
  • Death rate is 2.08 percent. Recovery rate is 71.73 percent. We’ve administered 886,305 tests with a 9 percent rate of positivity.
  • It has been 118 days since North Carolina’s first COVIDF-19 case was discovered on March 3.
• Guilford County posts 2,745 total diagnoses, up 160 from our last report on Thursday.
  • 1,598 recoveries (58.21 percent), 112 deaths (4.08 percent).
• Forsyth County posts 2,978 cases, 263 of them since Last Thursday. 1,850 recoveries (62.12 percent), 34 deaths (1.14 percent).
• It’s totally pointless to compare the coronavirus in the United States to other countries. We have the worst contagion rates, death rates and outcomes. Also, here, sometimes people go bankrupt when they survive. But it’s useful to compare states, especially ones of similar size. The NY Times has good visual data on this.
  • North Carolina had just been moved from the “cases increasing” category to “remain the same” category. But we shall see what the week holds.
  • California, Texas, Florida, Arizona are among states with dangerous spikes. Arizona, in particular, has gone to hell since June.

A diversion

Do you know about the Mods and the Rockers, and their feud in 1960s London that gave rise to ska, British rock, psychedelia and even skinheads? Do you love David Bowie? Then 1986’s Absolute Beginners is for you! It’s a stylized musical about that tumultuous period on history and culture, and it explores those boundaries between style, race and economic reality, with some great 1980s music. And also: Bowie, who actually lived through it all.

Program notes

• From the Metropolitan Museum of Art‘s public-domain collection, tonight we’ve got “Quarantine, Staten Island” by William James Bennett, 1833. It was the largest quarantine facility in the US at the time.
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