With increased (including employment-related) testing, case count should be increasing everywhere, but some of those could be recovered or asymptomatic.
We know that most hospitals were well below capacity, so new cases can be treated.
Here's the best resource Ive found for comparing all the relevant data:
http://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/
Playing around with the data there, it looks like yes NC has had an increase in cases recently, but it tracks an increase in testing. Test positivity rates are about flat. It really is completely pointless to discuss increases in cases without also comparing to increases in testing and positivity rates.
Deaths are up, but as another poster pointed out it's hardly statistically significant. The rolling 7 day average is 2.2/1m now, vs 1.7/1m on May 1st.
How is a 34% increase not statistically significant?
Because going from a daily death rate of 0.00017% to 0.00022% is still such a very small number, what might be called statistical noise.
If one person in my town is murdered this year, and 2 are murdered next year, that's a 100% year over year increase in the homicide rate. But it's obviously a meaningless increase.
2.2 out of a million is a small number. More people in NC are dying every day from cancer or heart disease.
I know you're not debating NC, but looking again at the state, it was mostly the last few weeks that looked flat. If you compare to the peak in positivity 42 days ago, they've gone from 16% positive to to 7% positive, using rolling 7 day averages. So, if I were in NC I wouldn't be overly concerned.