(Image source: Screenshot of May 8 WRAL report on “Mother’s Day weekend business boom sending much-needed help to Triangle restaurants.”)

While you’re stuck in 1970s-retro gas lines this week in North Carolina, at least you won’t have to worry too much about others in line. Here is the NC Threat-Free Index for the week ending May 10:

  • As of May 10, there were 950,929 North Carolinians presumed to be recovered from COVID-19
  • Active cases comprised just 2.1% of NC’s total case count (note: a case of COVID isn’t a permanent infection, and only someone with an active case of the virus can conceivably transmit it to you)
  • Active cases represented just under 0.2% (two-tenths of one percent) of NC’s population (note: active cases are lab-confirmed cases of COVID-19 minus recoveries and deaths)
  • Over 24 out of every 25 (96.6%) of NC’s total cases were recovered, meaning they are no longer infectious
  • Only just over 0.1% of people in NC had died with COVID-19 (regardless of the actual causeof death)
  • About 90.8% people in NC had never had a lab-confirmed case of COVID-19, despite the PCR test cycle threshold set so high as to produce a large amount of false positives (note: this proportion will always decline, but we have been living with this virus since February 2020, as far as testing is concerned)
  • All things considered, just over 99.8% of people in NC posed no threat of passing along COVID-19 to anyone — a virus most had never had and the rest had recovered from (note: this proportion will fluctuate based on relative growth in lab-confirmed cases vs. recoveries, and it is likely understated because it does not account for vaccinations)

It’s been over a year. It’s well, well, well past time for the governor to end this open-ended “emergency” rule.