Coronavirus daily update: Wednesday, May 13

The endless today

It’s Wednesday, I’m sure of it, because I’ve been starting a new list each morning with the day of the week on the heading. Just in case I forget, I’m using my pandemic time to finally shift from my beloved print day-planner to a digital calendar, which never forgets what day it is.

Blame it on Zoom.

And yet the days all seem the same, still — a grind both for those of us still working and the ones who cannot, because we’re all riding the clock, waiting and seeing, inching toward a resolution only slightly less hazy than it was two months ago, when the novel coronavirus shifted the axis of our world.

We pivoted. We waited. We masked up. We washed our hands. Nothing left to do but keep doing it, trying to read unruly tea leaves that make new patterns every. single. day.

The state’s three-phase plan is almost a single week into its first period. If the numbers go our way we could hit Phase 2 on May 22; that means restaurants and bars can open, we can get our hair cut and a few other perks. That’s at the earliest — the timeline allows for three weeks, which puts it at May 29. There’s a lot of shifting sand between now and then.

We decided to push back against the endless today by announcing our return to print — Triad City Beat will have an edition on the streets Thursday, June 4. We’ll continue breaking news on the website every day, but we’re newspaper people, deeply conditioned to the rhythms of the weekly process, and it’s time to get back on schedule.

Some news

• The DHHS released its weekly accounting of outbreaks in congregate-living facilities yesterday.
  • Forsyth County has just two outbreaks, one patient and one staff member at Oak Forest Health & Rehabilitation. No deaths.
  • Guilford County has been hit harder, with 44 cases at Camden Health & Rehabilitation (14 staff and 30 residents, six of whom have died) and 58 at Clapps Nursing Center (14 staff and 44 residents, 11 of whom have died).

The numbers

• Let’s go with these guys on NC today.
  • They’re reporting 339 new cases at 6 p.m. — for three straight days of relatively low numbers, below 360/day.
  • They’ve got us at 17 deaths (though I happen to know it’s at least 22) for a slight uptick in our fatality rate, which stands at 3.9 percent.
  • And they’ve recalibrated the recovery metric, so that we now know 9,115 North Carolinians have recovered from COVID-19, more than we have active cases, which here, now is 6,229.
  • Here they say Forsyth County has just four new cases, no new deaths, no new recoveries.
  • Guilford County data is incomplete here, so we veer to the county site to find that of the 683 total discovered cases (34 more than yesterday), 314 have recovered, 139 are hospitalized and 43 deaths, just one more today.
    • Guilford County Interim Public Health Director Iulia Vann told TCB today: “We’re seeing the cases increasing, but we’re not seeing them increase at an alarming rate. They’re increasing at a steady pace. I can’t necessarily put that on the reopening of last Friday of Phase 1. It can be a combination of reopening and people being more active. It can also be the testing that we’re doing. Also, our criteria is pretty flexible. The people we’re testing don’t need to be symptomatic, so that could drive up the numbers.”

A diversion: GI Joe

I was almost a little too old to be watching “GI Joe: A Real American Hero” cartoon when it debuted in 1983 — a wholesome yet explosion-riddled daily animated series made by Hasbro to sell toys. But I loved it, and later I loved the comic books, which delved more deeply into the lore than this saccharine series could — it’s where “Knowing is half the battle” comes from. But Hasbro is live-streaming the entire series on YouTube today, right now, and I urge you to tune in. (Link cannot be embedded, so just click it to join in).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_JTl6N7ZUjE

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 “Approaching Thunder Storm” by Martin Johnson Heade, 1859.
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