Coronavirus daily update: Tuesday, May 5

Sinkhole de Mayo

UPDATE: Gov. Cooper announced the state will be moving to Phase 1 on Friday at 5 p.m. More on this tomorrow.

It’s been exactly seven weeks since Gov. Cooper made Executive Order 118 on March 17, closing bars and restaurants, and limiting gatherings to no more than 10 people, among other restrictions. That’s when the toilet paper started disappearing, the meat started to run short and the enormity of the pandemic had yet to set in.

We already had 40 cases in the state that day — no deaths yet, not until a week later would we record our first — and no instances of community spread, which was something we talked about back then.

Just a quick reminder of where we’ve come since then before we get into the numbers.

The numbers

• Now we’re tracking testing: A more or less definitive metric to determine just how many of us are carrying around the coronavirus, or have come down with COVID-19. But the CDC page is sort of gibberish-y, so I’m using this site.
  • We’ve completed somewhere around 7.5 million tests in the US — 84 percent of them coming back negative, which still leaves about 1.2 million positives, some of which are active, some recovered and, as of today, 71,814 of them deceased.
  • If we’ve completed 7.5 million tests, that leaves 320 million to go before everyone is tested 25 million more before we even hit 10 percent of the US population.
• North Carolina has performed 151,800 COVID-19 tests thus far. There are 10.49 million of us.
• Guilford County reports 494 positives in total — 206 recoveries, 106 hospitalizations and 32 deaths, leaving 150 Guilfordians unaccounted for.
• The Forsyth County page is down, but I can report 16 new cases for a total of 287 diagnoses, with no new deaths and no new recoveries.

A diversion

Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy rose out of vaudeville to become one of the nation’s most beloved film-reel comedy teams in our cinematic history. The unlikely pair — Laurel a British stage actor known for his Charlie Chaplin-esque style and Hardy an American son of theater owners who began as a singer, of opposite proportions that made for an immediate visual gag — owned the medium through the 1920s, ’30s and ’40s with short, slapstick episodes screened in the picture shows and, later, feature films like Babes in Toyland, which would become a Christmas classic, and Putting Pants on Phillip, which did not. Here’s 1930’s “Another Fine Mess,” made at the height of their popularity and named for one of their catchphrases.

The ask

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