Coronavirus daily update: Monday, July 27

Reality’s ugly head

It’s tempting, at times, to imagine that the coronavirus pandemic has reached its apogee, that we’ve peaked in terms of new cases and that our death rate is leveling off.

And those things might be true. But that doesn’t change the fact that coronavirus continues to squirm its way into all of our lives, making itself known in places near and far, relentlessly preying on our species.

Some news

• Seventy-two hours into Major League Baseball’s adjusted season, 14 players and staff on the Florida Marlins tested positive for COVID-19. The team’s next two games are canceled, and the are all in quarantine in Philadelphia.
• National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien has tested positive for COVID-19.
• A new stimulus package is in the works — maybe another $1,200? Maybe by the end of the week?
• In discussing school reopening plans, CDC Director Robert Redfield outlined “hotspots” — places where it would be inadvisable to reopen schools — as having a positive-test rate freater than 5 percent.
  • NC is at 8 percent.
• Tweetsie Railroad has shut down for the foreseeable future. The numbers tell another story of our lost summer.

The numbers

• More from the state: We’ve had 5,343 new cases since Friday, 1,625 of them today. 114,338 total.
  • New recovery numbers: 92,302 (80.72 percent). That’s 13,595 more from last week’s report. 1,790 deaths (1.56 percent).
  • That’s 20,246 active cases, with 1,169 hospitalized (5.77 percent).
• 4,653 cases in Guilford County, adding just 137 through the weekend. No new deaths since Friday. 104 new recoveries (2,471, or 53.11 percent).
• Forsyth County adds 137 over the weekend, for 4,653, with 220 new recoveries (3,008, or 64.65 percent) and no new deaths.

A diversion

I went down the Flash Gordon rabbithole for a bit this afternoon, until I stumbled upon this gem of the deep internet: a fan edit of the entire run of “Flash Gordon” serialized shorts, which played on movie theaters on Saturday mornings in 1936. Does it age well? Probably not, but I haven’t watched it yet — it’s two hours long, weird and creepy but in a good way. From the creator: “Gets kind of janky when they’re escaping from the palace after rescuing Dale from marrying Ming, but other than that I think it turned out good.”

Program notes

• Tonight’s featured image is a marble statue of a lion from Ancient Greece, dated 400-390 BC. Taken from the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s public-domain collection.
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