Coronavirus daily update: Monday, Aug. 31

The last day

It’s the last day of August, effectively though not technically the last day of summer. And as long as we’re putting the inflatable, above-ground pools into storage and shelving our swimsuits for another year, there’s a few other things that need to be put away as well.

Let’s talk, for a minute, about the CDC claim that just 6 percent of US coronavirus deaths were from COVID-19 alone, that the rest all had an “underlying condition.” Some are claiming that this… admission?… has some sort of deeper meaning — that the coronavirus is bullshit and everyone will stop talking about it as soon as the election is over.

This is not true!

I mean, it is, and it’s not bad news that just 6 percent of the 187,569 Americans who have died from the novel coronavirus had no other serious conditions. But it doesn’t mean that it wasn’t the coronavirus that killed them. It means that the coronavirus exacerbated their asthma, or heart condition, or diabetes, or that their immune systems couldn’t handle COVID-19 while beiong stressed by something else.

There’s dangerous misinformation everywhere, and I implore al my readers not to accept something as fact just because it’s the easiest and most convenient thing to believe.

Now let’s talk about the numbers.

The numbers

• North Carolina set a record for one-day positive cases over the weekend: 2,585 on Saturday. But hey! Context: About 1,000 of them could be attributed. to delated reporting, which is lame, but actually not bad news. We followed that with a couple days at the four-figure mark and now have 167,313 total diagnoses. More context!
  • 145,884 are presumed to be recovered (87.19 percent). 2,734 are dead (1.63 percent). Of the existing 18,695 cases in North Carolina, 923 are currently hospitalized (4.94 percent).
  • Positive test rate: 7.2 percent.
• Forsyth County had a long weekend, with 146 new cases (6,160). Of those, 5,421 are recovered (88.00 percent), and 74 have died (1.20 percent). Of the current 665 (9.84 percent of total) cases in Forsyth, 18 are hospitalized (2.71 percent).
• In Guilford County, 227 new cases makes 6,754, of which 3,912 are recovered (57.92 percent) and 159 have died (2.35 percent). Of the current 2,683 cases (39.72 percent of total), 592 are hospitalized (22.06 percent).
• I do not know why Guilford has so many more current cases that Forsyth

A diversion

It’s a dark and stormy Monday. Let’s watch some Hitchcock. Here’s To Catch a Thief from 1955. Cary Grant and Grace Kelly. Need I say more?

Program notes

• For tonight’s featured image, we have “The Last Throw,” by Charles Robert Leslie, a Brit, in 1840. 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. Which is not very likely.
• If you’d like to help Triad City Beat, please consider becoming a supporter. You could also give us a like on Facebook and share our stories on Twitter.