It is Wednesday, isn’t it?

Man, is it me or are we getting stuck in some kind of rut? It’s Day 21 in North Carolina, marking the time since we initiated measures against the coronavirus and not, as was previously stated, the day we had our first diagnosis in North Carolina.

But what is time, anyway? Just another construct imposed upon the natural world, man. And it all kind of runs together in the great Stay At Home.

You sure it’s Wednesday? Could have sworn it was Thursday.

But while the week seems like one big smear, we have some news to mark the day.

Some news

  • There was a primary election in Wisconsin. Sort of.
  • Researchers at UNC-Chapel Hill are helping to develop a new COVID-19 treatment. Here’s a link the the published study, “An orally bioavailable broad-spectrum antiviral inhibits SARS-CoV-2 in human airway epithelial cell cultures and multiple coronaviruses in mice,” if you’re into that sort of thing.
  • Most stores — grocery, hardware and any other mass gathering places that are still operational — are enforcing social distancing by limiting the people in stores to half capacity. Anecdotally, I heard a store on Long Island was doing one-way aisles in the supermarket. We adapt!
  • A lot of people are talking about hydroxychloroquine — our president even learned how to pronounce it, and possibly make a buck off it! I don’t know much about it, but I verified a fact that it’s often terrible side effects are particularly debilitating, even deadly, for people of African descent.
  • Still waiting on those new executive orders form the governor. (I ponied up for a N&O subscription, by the way. They deserve it and I need the news. Those things are not unrelated). But let’s be real about it: I feel comfortable saying we are almost certainly going to be extending and refining the stay-at-home orders well into May.
  • But hey — we’re already into April, aren’t we? That’s a serious question. It’s not still March is it?
  • A factoid: We’ve registered 1,749 COVID-19 deaths today (up 13.6 percent from yesterday’s count, which is not good). But let’s put it in perspective, with this handy graph. Last year, on average, about 7,970 Americans died a day. Extrapolating the data, we can say that about 21 percent of the people who died in the US today can be attributed directly to COVID-19.
  • Good time to do the numbers.

The numbers

A diversion

Saturday morning cartoons used to be a thing. This one brings me back to the early 1970s, when “Underdog” was my absolute favorite cartoon. Back then it was buried so deep in syndication it was hard to find —usually very early on Sunday mornings. We had just one proper television set in the 1970s, along with a small black-and-white in the kitchen, and just a few channels that came in from an antenna on the roof. Amazing how quaint that sounds now. Anyway, here’s an “Underdog” from 1965, wherein archenemy Riff Raff sets out to steal that other famous painting “Whistler’s Father.” Hilarity, no doubt, ensues.

Program notes

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