Image source: Screenshot of April 29, 2020, WXII 12 News video of small business owner Matthew “Jax” Myers, who was arrested for reopening his tattoo business after receiving no small business assistance loan or federal Paycheck Protection Program help — and also after 13 failed attempts to collect unemployment — after Gov. Roy Cooper, in defiance of the state Emergency Management Act, declared his business “nonessential” and forced him and hundreds of thousands of other North Carolinians into immediate unemployment and then proceeded to make a shambles of the state Division of Employment Security, leaving hundreds of thousands of North Carolinians waiting for weeks to months just to collect unemployment insurance. Myers said, “I’m a law-abiding citizen; I’ve done nothing wrong; I’m not endangering lives; I’m trying to support my family.”

Here is the NC Threat-Free Index for the week ending June 14. Readers be advised: these numbers reflect what Gov. Roy Cooper desperately refers to as a “State of Emergency“:

  • As of June 14, there were 989,649 North Carolinians presumed to be recovered from COVID-19
  • Active cases comprised just 0.6% 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 0.06% (six-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 14, the estimate is now 70.3% of adult North Carolinians with immunity (vaccine-induced immunity andnatural 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 66% since May 14, when Cooper lifted nearly all restrictions) is also indicative that North Carolina is either at or very near herd immunity.

DHHS finds five more “new” Covid deaths from 2020

The past two weeks, I’ve noticed that DHHS keeps finding “new” Covid deaths that actually occurred in 2020. From last Monday’s report to this Monday’s (June 14), DHHS has added five more deaths from 2020. Four were in December.

One was in May — over a year ago.