Staying home, again
Don’t know if you got the word, but the coronavirus is back and kicking. We are on the rise, almost exactly parallel to the pandemic curve presented by the Spanish Flu in 1919, because time is a flat circle around here. If the past is any indicator of future success, the Spanish Flu died down the following summer. But not until 50 million people had died. We’ve only lost 1.3 million so far, but we’ve got better hospitals.
After three record-setting days in a row (for hospitalizations in NC), the governor’s office unleashed a new, color-coded map with the state’s critical hotspots in red — there are 10 — the substantial counties, which include Forsyth, in orange and the counties with significant community spread, like Guilford, in yellow. It’s all well and good, but I don’t see just yet how it prevent me from getting coronavirus.
The numbers are much more straightforward.
The numbers
- 3,288 new cases in NC today, because we love droplets! We break the 300K barrier with 301,998 total molecular-positive cases.
- 4,852 dead (+38), 1,501 hospitalized, a new high (+78)
- Positive test rate 8.6 percent. Droplets!
- Guilford County got it bad with 213 today, making 13,578. No new deaths (214) but 118 hospitalized out of 1,640 current cases (7.19 percent).
- Cone Health is kind of freaking out about it. They’re at an all-time high with 103 COVID-19 patients.
- Forsyth County is accelerating, with 168 new ones (11,182) and 150 deaths (+4). Of the 1,871 current cases, 37 are hospitalized (1.66 percent).
A diversion
I wanted to run a clip of Soupy Sales, who hosted kids TV shows in the 1950s and ’60s. Soupy got kicked off his show after riffing on live TV, suggesting the kids take some of those “funny, green pieces of paper” from their fathers’ wallets and mail them to the studio. I couldn’t find the episode, but I did stumble across one of his side projects: a pilot for a show he did with Gale Gordon in 1966 called “Where There’s Smokey.” I have not watched yet but I know it’s going to be horrible, in a good way.
Program notes
- For tonight’s featured image, we’ve got “The Five Senses and the Four Elements,” British in origin, from the second quarter of the 17th Century. Taken from the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s public-domain collection.
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