Coronavirus daily update: Tuesday, May 26

Green shoots

We had a little good news in North Carolina today: a low new-case count. It comes nested in some other, more troubling numbers, but we’ll hit that later.

For now let’s acknowledge that things are coming back: restaurants, breweries, salons, some retail and other concerns are beginning to emerge from hibernation, or have begun to make plans for reopening, while others are charging into the pandemic full tilt. And after a couple months of quarantine living, there are plenty of takers in the proposition. It’s out there, if you want it.

Some news

• The Greensboro Aquatic Center announced plans for a “limited reopening” on June 1: Lap lanes and classes for embers and swim-club practices.
• Guilford County’s got two new COVID-19 testing days at Windsor Recreation Center: Thursday and Friday, 10 a.m.-2 p.m. This is a test for COVID-19, the disease caused by coronavirus infection, and not a test for coronavirus antibodies.
• App State is dropping three sports: men’s soccer, men’s tennis and men’s indoor track & field. ECU also dropped four sports from its department: men’s swimming and diving, women’s swimming and diving, men’s tennis and women’s tennis.
• The governor had a press conference today in which he addressed two items in particular: President Trump’s threat to pull the Republican National Convention from Charlotte in August unless there are no restrictions for crowd sizes, mask requirements or any other hindrances to coronavirus. Naturally, Trump announced this on Twitter.

The numbers

• North Carolina had a big drop in new cases today: just 176, down from yesterday’s 742 yesterday. That makes 24,140 total diagnoses in the state.
  • 14,954 recoveries includes more than 3,000 reported today.
  • Those 176 cases came from just 3,503 tests — low compared to 8,034 yesterday. But the percentage of positives also dropped from more than 9 percent down to 5.0 percent.
  • And 103 of those new cases came from the Triad.
• Forsyth County breaks 1,000 with 44 new cases — that’s 1,012 total, of which 95 have recovered and nine have died; 905 active cases.
• Guilford County has 1,092 total diagnoses — that’s 59 new ones today. 496 recoveries, 50 deaths, 181 hospitalizations.
• The US as a whole is on a downslope, but North Carolina is not. See the NY Times data here.

A diversion

I guess I’ve been missing New Orleans lately. This afternoon my thoughts wandered to Everette Maddox, the bard of Oak Street — a drunken, sloe-eyed poet and, perhaps, a genius who held court at the Maple Leaf, when he was allowed in, and Cooter Brown’s or Carrollton Station when he wasn’t. His time and mine in the city didn’t overlap, but I knew him because my employer, an artist by the name of Steve Rucker, had known him back in the day and filled me in on the lore. Apparently, he was the inspiration for Barfly. Everette’s ashes are buried somewhere behind the Maple Leaf still, and his picture was on the wall the last time I was in there. Here’s a short, 40-minute doc on Everette, aptly titled, He Was a Mess.

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 “Great Indian Fruit Bat,” by Bhawani Das, 1777-82.
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