Coronavirus daily update: Thursday, June 4

Free Newspaper Day

Today Triad City Beat came back with a new issue for the first time in 10 weeks — 16 pages, which is not too bad, considering that we’re in the middle of a global pandemic and most businesses don’t have a lot of cash flying around for marketing, which is how we pay for everything.

And once again, in the hours since we put the paper to bed and the time it hit the streets, more news has happened.

Some news

• Some black men were arrested with guns after Tuesday night’s protest in Greensboro, yet some white buys nearby, with bigger guns, were not. Jordan Green looked into it.
• Sayaka Matsuoka found more proof of the use of pepper pellets and tear gas in downtown Greensboro on Saturday night.
• We wrapped up the first few days of protests in Greensboro and Winston-Salem in today’s paper, with video footage of all the action.
• Guilford County has a new grant program for small businesses, up to $10,000.
• Street protests in Greensboro and Winston-Salem continue. Meanwhile, the pandemic grows.

The numbers

• It was the worst day yet in terms of new cases in North Carolina: 1,189. But it was also the best day yet in terms of testing: 19,039. The math: 6.24 percent returned positive.
  • On Monday the state released official recovery numbers. Sorry I missed it. We’ve got 18,860.
  • 31,966 total diagnoses against 18,860 recoveries — almost exactly 59 percent — and 1,013 deaths (3.16 percent death rate) gives us 1t least 12,093 active cases.
• The state’s COVID-19 surveillance data came out today, as well. Not my thing but worth a look.
• Guilford counts 1,498 total diagnoses (+83 today), with 75 deaths (5 percent) and 784 recoveries (52.33 percent).
• Forsyth claims 1,620 total diagnoses (+103), with 14 total deaths (0.8 percent) and 95 recoveries (5.86 percent), which doesn’t quite add up. More reporting is needed.
• The United States has 1,110,487 active cases of COVID-19; 110,030 Americans have died from the coronavirus disease since February.

A diversion

Man, I wish I had time to watch TV tonight. If I did — and if I’m not livestreaming, I will — I’d be looking for some escapism, something timeless, of high quality, meticulously shot in its day, which was far enough back that the piece wouldn’t remind me of the shitshow outside my own window. So… Hitchcock. I delved into his work during a film class in college and have always been slightly enamored of his ability to exercise his will over a work, down to the last camera angle. “Actors are cattle,” he once said. Or maybe he didn’t. Either way, you can’t argue with the body of work. Here’s an episode of his TV show, “The Alfred Hitchcock Hour,” from around 1964.

Program notes

• From the Metropolitan Museum of Art‘s public-domain collection, tonight we’ve got “Portrait of a Gentleman in a Carriage,” by an unknown American artist between 1850-60.
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