Coronavirus daily update: Monday, Aug. 10

The fall of football

As the day wears on, bad news has been trickling in from the NCAA as college football conferences began cancelling their 2020 seasons. The Ivy League has canceled all fall sports, and the MAC and Big 10 followed this week. It doesn’t look particularly good for any conferences right now.

For fans, this is a not-insurmountable problem: Tough shit, no college football this year. For colleges it is a somewhat different matter, as many rely overmuch on revenue generated from their football programs. And for student athletes who went to college expressly to play footall — and have very tight windows of time in which to do so — it is potentially devastating.

Sucks.

As for the coming NFL season, for which I selfishly hold out hope, the professional league is responding with gusto, contemplating Saturday games for the 2020 season.

But like everything else, these solutions are just temporary, held hostage to the whims of the coronavirus, and those who wold spread it around.

Oh yeah — we had an earthquake. That piece of spot news lasted about half a day in today’s hypercharged news cycle.

The numbers

• Very good news in North Carolina: 626 new cases today, albeit on low testing rates, but still. That’s the lowest it’s been in months.
  • And check it out! Our positive-test rate is at 5 percent! That is considered safe-ish for things like school and such.
  • New recovery numbers have not yet dropped — though they are supposed to land before 4 p.m. We’ll try again tomorrow.
• Guilford County weighs in with 5,644, that’s up 131 since Friday. With 3,250 recoveries (57.58 percent) and 149 deaths (2.63 percent). Of the current 2,245 cases 524 are currently hospitalized (23.34 percent).
• Forsyth County has 5,286 total diagnoses, of which 138 came since Friday. 4,101 have recovered (77.58 percent) and 52 have died (0.98 percent). That leaves 1,133 cases; the number of hospitalizations is unavailable.

A diversion

It’s the 35th anniversary of the film Real Genius, which was a big hit for a young Val Kilmer during a very very tight window in the mid-1980s when it was sort of cool to be a smart nerd. This one is way better than its companion piece, Revenge of the Nerds, which these days almost literally cannot be watched. Here’s a bootleg Youtube copy of this great little movie, which ends with a pop.

Program notes

• Tonight’s featured image is “Kitchen Scene,” by Peter Wtewael, a lesser Dutch Master, from the 1620s. Taken from the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s public-domain collection.
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