4:12 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.” Reisinger says in 2020 Buncombe County recorded 4,098 deaths and 4,050 births. “So, it took a pretty substantial event to create that.”