Push for wider reopening
US President Donald Trump said on Monday that he has been taking the malaria and lupus drug hydroxychloroquine, unproven for fighting COVID-19, to lessen symptoms if he gets the novel coronavirus.
In the weeks before telling reporters he was taking the drug, Trump has touted it as a potential cure for COVID-19, even though the Food and Drug Administration, or FDA, cautioned last month that it could cause significant side effects in some patients, including heart rhythm problems, and should be used only on hospitalized patients or as part of clinical trials.
Trump made the revelation during a roundtable with restaurant executives at the White House.
He then told reporters that he has been taking hydroxychloroquine and a zinc supplement daily “for about a week and a half now and I’m still here, I’m still here”.
Trump said his doctor did not recommend the drug to him but that he requested it from the White House physician.
“I started taking it, because I think it’s good. I’ve heard a lot of good stories,” he said, suggesting that many medical workers were also taking the drug.
“You’d be surprised at how many people are taking it, especially the front-line workers before you catch it … many, many are taking it,” he said.
The president said he does not know if it works, but “if it doesn’t, you’re not going to get sick and die”, he added, seeming to brush aside FDA warnings.
The number of COVID-19 cases in the United States topped 1.5 million on Monday, reaching 1,500,753, according to the Center for Systems Science and Engineering at Johns Hopkins University. The national death toll rose to 90,312.
New York remains the hardest-hit state with 351,371 cases and 28,339 fatalities. Other states with over 50,000 cases include New Jersey, Illinois, Massachusetts, California, Pennsylvania and Michigan.
Over 40 states have restarted or partially restarted their economies, although the country in general has not seen a downward trend in COVID-19 infection.
On Monday, more states lifted restrictions, including Michigan, where Governor Gretchen Whitmer has stayed firm with one of the nation’s toughest lockdowns despite protests from Republican opponents and armed demonstrations at the statehouse.
Whitmer signed an order that will allow businesses and restaurants in northern Michigan to reopen by the Memorial Day weekend. The order affects the sparsely populated Upper Peninsula and 17 counties in the tourism-heavy northern tip of the Lower Peninsula.
New York, California and Massachusetts on Monday also eased restrictions, and Trump continued his push for a wider reopening: “REOPEN OUR COUNTRY! TRANSITION TO GREATNESS,” Trump wrote in a Twitter post on Monday.
Most states reported a drop in new cases for the week ended on May 17, with only 13 states seeing a rise in infections compared with the previous week, Reuters reported. Tennessee had the biggest weekly increase at 33 percent.
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said the western corner of the state, which includes Niagara Falls, would become the sixth of New York’s 10 regions to start reopening on Tuesday.
New York, which has the most deaths of any state, is showing more signs of containing the spread. The three-day rolling average of hospitalizations is declining, and the number of fatalities dropped to 106 on Sunday versus 139 on Saturday.
New York Mayor Bill de Blasio said on Monday that the city may meet the thresholds set by the state to reopen in the first half of June.
In the San Francisco Bay Area, health directors in five counties said manufacturing and retail with curbside pickup and warehouse distribution could reopen.