Coronavirus daily update: Saturday, May 9

Late-night edition

Did you know Senate Majority Leader Phil Berger has his own Medium channel? Well he does, and it’s sort of troubling in the way that Trump’s Twitter feed is troubling, or that time when Trudy Wade was in the NC Senate and she printed her own four-page, one-off newspaper because she didn’t like the way she was treated in the press.

But hey, there’s a disclaimer right there at the top of the page: “Anyone can publish on Medium per our Policies, but we don’t fact-check every story.”

Today Berger posted an article about the coronavirus-antibody research that’s begun in North Carolina, heavy on words but low on information. Some highlights:

• 1,475 antibody test kits have been sent out; 675 have come back. Of those 2.2 percent tested positive for coronavirus antibodies — meaning that they have been exposed to the virus.
• Check the data here.

Only other news item I’ve got tonight concerns the Tyson chicken plant in Wilkesboro, which has been closed for a thorough cleaning after a COVID-19 outbreak responsible for most of the cases in Wilkes County.

And a quick reminder before we get to the numbers: Don’t get your news from YouTube.

The numbers

• We’ve got 492 new cases in NC, which gives us a drop in the 7-day rolling average to 407, down from 421.
  • DHHS figures: 14,360 total diagnoses, 544 deaths, 513 currently hospitalized.
    • Dig a little deeper: We’ve got at least 11,789 active cases.
  • We’ve completed 186,362 tests this far, up from 178,613 yesterday. At this rate, it will take three or four years to test everybody in the state.
• Guilford County has not updated its page, so the total stands from yesterday: 576.
• Forsyth County adds 15 more for 369.

A diversion

I was trying to com up with a great TV mom on the night before Mother’s Day, without being too basic. So I’m going with Shirley Partridge, played by Shirley Jones in the TV series “The Partridge Family.” She was pretty square for a rock-and-roll mom. Lot of scolding and finger-wagging going on in that house. But she also had Danny Bonaduce and David Cassidy to deal with. This was an awesome show, and I’d love to get into its tangled history with “The Brady Bunch,” but instead I’ll just drop the pilot episode on you, from 1970.

Program notes

• I’m getting my public-domain images from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City these days. We just call it “the Met.” Tonight we’ve got “Mother and Son,” by Thomas Sully, 1840. Doesn’t quite fit the frame, but it seems right on time.
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