COVID-19 News from Around the Web

Mass protests against police violence across the U.S. have public health officials concerned about an accelerated spread of the coronavirus. But even before the protests began May 26, sparked by the May 25 death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, several states had been recording big jumps in the number of cases. The U.S. is still seeing roughly 20,000 new cases a day. There's a wide range from state to state, from one case a day, on average, last week in Hawaii all the way up to to 2,614 new cases a day in California. Specific areas in the Golden State have become hot spots, along with certain counties in every Southern state. The northeastern states of New York, New Jersey and Massachusetts — which among them accounted for a quarter of all COVID-19 deaths in the U.S. — are seeing a substantial slowing of new cases. A closer look at these hard-hit areas highlights some of the common and unique challenges states face as they manage protests and begin efforts to reopen the economy amid the risks of more disease and death.

Nearly two out of five Americans are using bleach and other household cleaners in potentially dangerous ways in an effort to protect themselves against COVID-19 infection, a new survey reveals. About 20% Americans say they have applied bleach to their fruits and vegetables as a means of disinfection, a practice not recommended by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Another study estimated that the shutdowns saved about 3.1 million lives in 11 European countries and dropped infection rates by an average of 82 percent. Both reports were published Monday in the journal Nature. The two reports provide fresh evidence that aggressive and unprecedented shutdowns, which caused massive economic disruptions, were necessary to halt the exponential spread of the novel coronavirus. The first study, from researchers at the University of California at Berkeley, examined six countries — China, the United States, France, Italy, Iran and South Korea — and estimated how 1,717 different interventions, such as stay-at-home orders, business closings and travel bans, altered the spread of the virus. The report concluded that those six countries collectively managed to avert 62 million test-confirmed infections, which the researchers estimate would correspond to roughly 530 million total infections.

The federal unemployment rate declined to 13.3 percent in May, down from 14.7 percent in April, the Department of Labor said Friday, a sign that economy is improving quicker than economists had projected. 2.5 million people gained jobs in May, as states and counties began to reopen around the country. There are hopes that these figures show the country is moving away from the nadir of the crisis — the rocky bottom below which the United States will sink no further. Yet, with some 30 million workers collecting unemployment benefits, the labor market has been upended.

The Lancet, one of the world’s top medical journals, on Thursday retracted an influential study that raised alarms about the safety of the experimental Covid-19 treatments chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine amid scrutiny of the data underlying the paper. Just over an hour later, the New England Journal of Medicine retracted a separate study, focused on blood pressure medications in Covid-19, that relied on data from the same company. The retractions came at the request of the authors of the studies, published last month, who were not directly involved with the data collection and sources, the journals said.