Coronavirus daily update: Monday, Oct. 19, 2020

A quiet scream

We’ve been at this pandemic business for seven months now, and we suck at it. Here, in the middle of October and right before the actual flu season, we’re right where we were in the beginning of July, with more than 2,000 new cases a day and superspreaders popping off like fireworks — which, by the way, are still happening on weekend evenings in my neighborhood.

Forget the news. I want to ram these numbers down everybody’s throats until we get a handle on this thing.

The numbers

• Don’t let today’s relatively low case count — 1,144 — fool you: We’ve had like 7,000 new cases since Friday in North Carolina for 238,894.
  • New recovery numbers: 218,541 (91.44 percent).
  • 29 new deaths over the weekend for 3,939 (1.65 percent)
  • 1,152 hospitalized.
• Guilford County has 240 new cases today for 10,304. There have been 5,898 (57.24 percent) recoveries and 187 (1.81 percent) deaths
  • Of the current 4,219 active cases, 90 (2.13 percent) are hospitalized.
• Forsyth County has 24 new cases today, 8,155 total. There have been 7,142 (87.58 percent) recoveries and 112 (1.37 percent) deaths.
  • Current cases: 901.

A diversion

We’re watching the season finale of “Lovecraft Country” tonight — it’s dope — so I’m bringing a Lovecraft film that looks like it’s from the 1930s but was actually made in 2011: The Whisperer in the Darkness.

Program notes

• For tonight’s featured image, we’ve got “Teasing a Sleeping Girl,” by Gaspare Traversi, around 1760. Why they teasing her?! Taken from the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s public-domain collection.
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