Here is the NC Threat-Free Index for the week ending June 21. Readers be advised: these numbers reflect what Gov. Roy Cooper desperately refers to as a “State of Emergency” necessitating him and only a few other governors nationwide to order small children to remain muzzled and breathing through pathogen-filled cloth:

  • As of June 21, there were 992,097 North Carolinians presumed to be recovered from COVID-19
  • Active cases comprised just 0.5% 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 0.05% (five-hundredths of one percent) of NC’s population (note: active cases are lab-confirmed cases of COVID-19 minus recoveries and deaths)
  • Over 49 out of every 50 (98.1%) 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 cause of death)
  • About 90.5% 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, over 99.9% 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)

Community immunity update

For June 21, the estimate is now 71.0% of adult North Carolinians with immunity (vaccine-induced immunity and natural immunity), using CDC estimates of actual infections and DHHS estimates of current vaccinations and the formula outlined here.

As a reminder, it is widely accepted that herd immunity from Covid-19 is with 70% of people immune. Furthermore, the ongoing, rapid decline in virus numbers in North Carolina (new cases are down 73% just since May 14, when Cooper lifted nearly all restrictions) is also indicative that North Carolina is either at or very near herd immunity.