Mondays are special days at the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services (NCDHHS). On Mondays, the NCDHHS releases the number of people in North Carolina who have recovered from confirmed cases of COVID-19.

The NCDHHS lists the total number of people in the state who have tested positive in 2020 daily, as if the fact that someone tested positive in March really has meaning at the end of October. It is a big scary number. On Monday, Oct. 26, it was 251,937 for the standard test.

But the NCDHHS has also started adding the antigen test and reports an even larger number, 261,742, which is the total number of people who have tested positive for COVID-19 in the state in 2020 from both tests.

But on Mondays, the NCDHHS also reports the number of people who have recovered. It doesn’t report the number of people who currently have tested positive and, according to the NCDHHS, have active cases of COVID-19. It seems like this would be a number the NCDHHS would report, but people have to do the math on their own, or have someone do the math for them.

All calculations are done based on the standard (PCR) test because the results of the antigen test only started being reported in October.

According to the NCDHHS, 231,611 people who tested positive had recovered by Monday, Oct. 26. The NCDHHS also reported that 4,108 people in the state had died from COVID-19 in 2020. The result is that currently 16,218 people, of the 10.5 million people in the state, have confirmed active cases of COVID-19.

The number of deaths from COVID-19 continues on a downward trend. The number of deaths is a lagging indicator, which means the last date for which the NCDHHS states the number of deaths is confirmed is Oct. 12, when 21 people in the state died from COVID-19. On both Oct. 11 and Oct. 10, the NCDHHS reported 17 deaths from COVID-19.

This is less than half of the total deaths on the worst day of the pandemic – August 1 – when 40 deaths were reported based on the standard test.

Still, as of Oct. 12, the last date for which the number of COVID-19 deaths is complete, only one child in the state under the age of 18 has died and only four people between the ages of 18 and 25, according to the NCDHHS.