OUR VIEW

Sweltering, oppressive conditions have enveloped us. They always do this time of year.

Our calendar says the Dog Days begin July 3 and end Aug. 11. The Farmer’s Almanac aligns these 40 days with the heliacal rising of the dog star, Sirius.

We know it’s likely going to be hot and sticky well past that second week of August.

And we’ve accepted the coronavirus is going to be dogging us along the way as well.

Whatever hopes we once had that warmer — much less hot — weather was going to quell the rise of the virus have gone the way of horse and mule in farming. It’s not happening.

But it is important that we take the information coming out and process it in context.

Jon Sanders, who studies regulatory policy for the John Locke Foundation in Raleigh, has been pulling data from the N.C. Department of Health and Human Services reports.

What he found is relevant and much better news than what most of us get through standard statistical reports, those DHHS puts out and are conveyed by print and broadcast media. Why DHHS isn’t amplifying the charts and graphs to go with Sanders’ information, we can’t be certain but can only offer a guess.

Sanders, in a piece published Friday, showed the hospitalization rate — meaning lab-confirmed cases in the hospital as a percentage of active cases — peaked in the first days of June not far from 7.5 percent and has steadily fallen since. It’s less than 5 percent now, a veritable flat line.

The percentage of COVID-19 tests that are positive, a rolling seven-day average, from April 1 to July 9 saw a spike of about 30 percent just before April 15. It has been between 5 and 10 percent since May 6, another virtual flat line.

The seven-day rolling average for new fatalities reported between June 1 and July 9 has dropped from more than 20 to about 10. It has been between 10 and 15 since June 5.

It is context needed when we learn, for example, the number of cases in a given day is a new high, or that the number of people hospitalized is the most for one day.

All are truths.

The big worry, as Gov. Roy Cooper and cabinet-level Secretary Dr. Mandy Cohen told us from the outset in March, is people’s health and North Carolina’s hospitals being overwhelmed. As the Bladen Journal first reported Saturday on BladenJournal.com, even with hospitalizations up 43 percent in the last month, the ventilators, hospital beds and ICU beds are within miniscule percentage points of availability today as they were a month ago and in points between.

As for a March estimate of more than 200,000 hospitalizations coming, that’s off the chart North Carolina’s line runs below.

Make no mistake: The virus is deadly, it’s very real, and it’s very important for us to do safe practices.

It’s also responsible to get fair and balanced interpretations of the information. Nobody should be getting dogged.