Coronavirus daily update: Tuesday, July 28

Talking heads on TV

It was a day of press conferences, meetings and inquisitions on the teevee news — or whatever screen upon which you happened to be watching.

We had Attorney General Bill Barr perform a spectacular piece of gaslighting in front of the House Judiciary Committee.

We had Gov. Roy Cooper at a presser announce a statewide order to cut off alcohol sales at 11 p.m. beginning Friday evening — this is in restaurants and breweries, not grocery stores or convenience stores.

And we had a Guilford County schools live presentation of the 2020 reopening plan. The link is to the PowerPoint of that plan.

Some other stuff happened too.

Some news

• The Carolina Classic Fair, formerly known as the Dixie Classic, has been canceled. It was scheduled for Oct. 2-11.
• North Carolina is one of 21 “red zone” states that need to impose more restrictions, according to the federal coronavirus task force. This is directly due to the numbers.

The numbers

• An average day in North Carolina means 1,749 new cases, making 116,087 total diagnoses, of which at least 92,302 have recovered and 1,820 have died.
  • Around 21,000 cases are extant right now, 1,244 (5.92 percent) of which are hospitalized — 110 confirmed in the last 24 hours, 323 suspected.
  • Our positive testing rate has dropped to 7 percent.
• Guilford County has 4,837 total diagnoses, with 184 new ones today; 2,541 (52.53 percent) have recovered and 136 (2.81 percent) have died. Of the remaining 2,160 cases, 457 (21.15 percent) are hospitalized.
• Forsyth County reports 4,654 total cases today, with 3,093 recuperations (66.45 percent) and 44 deaths (0.95 percent). There are 1,517 active cases.

A diversion

Americans of a certain age might remember the shady legacy of Max Headroom, a strange pop-culture figure from the 1980s who emerged from Britain, a fake AI played by actor Matt Frewer who claimed to come from the future, albeit just 20 minutes into it. Ut was a British talk show, then it was a made-for-TV movie; he was in a Coke commercial, parodied in Doonesbury and was featured in a video game on the Commodore 64. Here’s the TV movie, from the perfect talking head.

Program notes

• Tonight’s featured image is a “The Burial of Punchinello,” by Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo, part of a series from around 1800. Taken from the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s public-domain collection.
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