As the country watches the COVID death toll cross the half million mark, a Western North Carolina official has been taking inventory of the local impact. As BPR’s Helen Chickering reports, he ended up with a snapshot for the entire state. “We were trying to close out our 2020 numbers and we came across this statistic that was pretty jaw-dropping,” says Buncombe County Register of Deeds, Drew Reisinger. “For the first time in recorded history in Buncombe County, we had more deaths than births.”