Daily corona round-up

On the road

With the heaviness of the coronavirus settling in like one of those weighted blankets and the lessons of the last week starting to sink in, I am going to take a short pause. Shortly after I file this update, I am going to grab my wife, jump in the car and head west for a couple days.

I’ve realized the only way I can truly disengage from the news cycle is to GTFO. If anything extraordinary happens, I will deal with it on Monday, like a regular person, with apologies in advance for the dead air.

I’m filing early, so the news hasn’t fully happened yet, and the numbers are preliminary, but I learned something new about Forsyth County’s statistics, which I will drop here in the Numbers.

The numbers

  • Today was the worst day yet for new cases in North Carolina… by a lot. We have 1,768 new cases, for a total of 41,249 total. At least 23,653 have recovered (no new ones in four days) and 1,106 have died.
    • This gives us around 16,670 active cases that we know about.
    • The cases come on 21,442 tests, so 8.24 percent. That’s a lot.
  • Looking to the state site for county info, we’ve got Forsyth County topping out at 2,052, which means 84 new cases.
    • An alert reader informed me that Forsyth Dept. of Health is updating accurate info to its Facebook page every day. As of yesterday, Forsyth has 1,188 recoveries and 25 deaths. That leaves a more rational 839 active cases.
  • Guilford County, which also has yet to update its own page, registers 1,899 total cases, making just nine more from yesterday.
  • So far, more than 2 million Americans have been infected with the coronavirus. North Carolina is in the Top 5 in terms of growth. But while most other states are just now hitting a second wave, in NC we never even slowed down. See this graph for a visual depiction.

A diversion

It’s not really a diversion, but you need to watch Dave Chappelle’s latest, released yesterday on YouTube. It’s powerful.

Program notes

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