Coronavirus daily update: Friday, Sept. 25

The slippery slope

Earlier this week, I was sure that we wouldn’t hit 200,000 COVID-19 diagnoses in North Carolina until next week — maybe even next month! But a cascade of new cases over the last three days has blasted through that admittedly arbitrary barrier.

A look at the NY Times graphic shows that we are setting ourselves up for a third wave of COVID-19 cases. This comes just as Guilford County Schools has approved a phased re-entry plan, with some students coming back to the classroom as soon as Oct. 20.

• Middle-schoolers and K-2 return Oct. 20
• Grades 3-5 return Oct. 26
• High-schoolers return Jan. 20

More news: Two Republican members of the NC State Board of Election resigned over what they said was a lack of transparency about a mail-in voting issue. The documents tell a different story.

The numbers

• 1,693 new cases in NC today. Total: 204,331.
  • A note about the numbers: The state is now differentiating between molecular positive cases (PCR), which total 199,768, and antigen positive cases, which total 4,563.
  • Positive test rate jumps to 5.2 percent.
• Forsyth County has 47 new cases (6,956), one new death (98) and 6,365 recoveries.
• Guilford County clocks 71 new cases (8,463), no new deaths (171) and 4,991 recoveries.

A diversion

One more homage to the Karate Kind franchise: A “live” comic book reading featuring Hong Kong Phooey and Black Lightning from DC comics. Apparantly Hong Kong Phooey was in Vietnam? Let me know how it ends.

Program notes

• For tonight’s featured image, we’ve got “A Young Woman and a Cavalier,” by Cornellis Bisschop in the early 1660s. Taken from the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s public-domain collection. And hey: The Met is now open on Fifth Avenue in NYC, if you’re in town.
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