Coronavirus daily update: Monday, Nov. 2

The one that almost didn’t happen

It would have been so easy to talk myself out of making an update tonight. I’ve been grinding all day, and the election is tomorrow, and I haven’t really eaten anything yet. Plenty of excuses, but no good reasons.

I’ve been filing these almost every night for eight months now, too, so I’ve internalized the chore. Not sure if I’d be able to fall asleep tonight if I didn’t write one.

And I think it’s important to note that the pandemic has taken a turn for the worse.

But I’m working the election tomorrow night, so you won;t get another one of these until Wednesday.

The numbers

• 1,336 new cases in North Carolina today — low! We’ve had more than 2,800 per day since Friday. 266,451 total.
  • New recovery numbers: 246,318 (92.44 percent)
  • 4,390 deaths (1.65 percent)
  • 15,743 current cases
    • 1,146 hospitalized (7.28 percent)
• Guilford County has 320 new cases today. That is a lot — about 24 percent of the state’s new cases. 11,898 total.
  • Two new deaths for 202
  • 8,384 recoveries (70.46 percent)
  • 3,312 active cases (21 percent of the state total)
  • 89 hospitalizations (2.69 percent)
• Facebook is down! And Forsyth County page has weak data. But I found 68 new cases for 9,289.
  • No new deaths (121, 1.3 percent)

A diversion

It’s the night before the election and I don’t know what to do about it. So here’s a BBC documentary about John Steinbeck. He is the best novelist this country ever produced. Be safe tomorrow.

Program notes

• For tonight’s featured image, we’ve got “A Boy with a Cat — Morning” by Thomas Gainsborough, 1787. Taken from the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s public-domain collection.
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