On Tuesday, the John Locke website posted an article about North Carolina’s response to the coronavirus.

The article includes the following information:

Here is the NC Threat-Free Index for the week ending May 17:

• • As of May 17, there were 963,539 North Carolinians presumed to be recovered from COVID-19
  • Active cases comprised just 1.6% 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 over 0.1% (one-tenth of one percent) of NC’s population (note: active cases are lab-confirmed cases of COVID-19 minus recoveries and deaths)
  • Now 34 out of every 35 (97.1%) 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 90.6% 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, nearly 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 understand because it does not account for vaccinations)

The title of the article asks the question, “The NC Threat-Free Index for the Week Ending May 17 — and Why Are We Still Under a “State of Emergency”?”  That is a very good question.