Now 77 Percent of NC’s Known COVID-19 Cases Are in Recovery | Eastern North Carolina Now

Publisher's note: The author of this post is Jon Sanders for the John Locke Foundation.

    On Mondays, the NC Department of Health and Human Services publishes a little-noted statistic: patients presumed to have recovered from the virus.

    That number has grown at an increasing rate relative not only to known cases, but more importantly, relative to deaths. Since those numbers are all related (very few cases end up in death, so the rest are recoveries), it's good news that recoveries is the number growing at the fastest rate.

    Here are the most recent numbers (July 13):

• Total known cases: 87,528
• Total deaths: 1,510
• Total recoveries: 67,124

    Here are some implications of those data (based on known cases):

• There are 18,894 active cases of COVID-19 in NC
• There are 3.6 times more people who've recovered from COVID-19 in NC than who have it
• There are 44.5 times more people who've recovered from COVID-19 in NC than succumbed to it
• Those rates will grow weekly because most of the early known cases of COVID-19 were of the already very ill who were more likely to succumb to it
• 76.7 percent of NC's known cases of COVID-19 are already recovered from it