Coronavirus daily update: Sunday, April 19

The stages of grief

I’m starting to get used to it.

I spent a lot of time at home before the coronavirus dropped just one month ago. My wife and I are working, and, if we’re being honest, enjoying this close time with our kids.

And I’m getting adjusted to writing this nightly dispatch, though it’s been a good many years since I did this much writing on the reg.

I suppose I’m at the final stage of grief on the Kübler-Ross model: acceptance. I’ve got a pretty good idea of where we’re at and where we need to go — though I admit I have no idea what life looks like on the other side of this.

I know, for example, that perhaps 1 in 4 Americans who carry the coronavirus will show no symptoms, that we have barely scratched the surface in the matter of testing — just 3.9 million Americans have been tested as of today, which is about 1 percent of the population — and that those two things mean we have no real idea how many people are walking around carrying this thing.

On that front, a group of North Carolina universities have teamed up with DHHS to administer a coronavirus-antibody test to about 1,000 state residents, so we can get an idea of how many of us are unknowingly infected.

This action also can be attributed to the fifth stage of Kübler-Ross.

Also in NC, the reopen NC people (not linking them) are now suing Gov. Roy Cooper for his stay-at-home executive orders.

I’d put this act between stages two and three in the Kübler-Ross model: anger and bargaining.

Here’s the numbers.

The numbers

• Forsyth County adds one more case for a total of 128.
  • They’ve added 28 people to the recovery list to make 95.
• Guilford County adds seven more diagnoses, for a total of 183. No recovery data.
• Add 222 to the list today for the state of North Carolina, which is about our average for the last month. We’ve now clocked 6,591 cases. That’s about 1,000 in the last three days.
• We’ve got 200 deaths, and at least 1,177 recoveries — partial data set.
• Looks like somebody shut this kid down.

A diversion

One of my all-time favorite movies is a little-known film from 1980 called Fatso, in which Dom DeLuise plays the role of an Italian American struggling with his relationship toward food. It’s the directorial debut of Anne Bancroft, so at times it feels a bit like the work of her husband, Mel Brooks, but it’s much more poignant than his works. Her caricature of — and critique on — Italian-American culture is wondrous.

But no one has ever heard of this movie, and it’s never available anywhere. But lo and behold, I found it on YouTube. I really hope it ages well.

Program Notes

• Tonight’s featured image is a “Diana and Endymion” by Luca Giordano, right around 1675. Thanks to the National Gallery of Art‘s public-domain collection.
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