Forty-two million people have filed for unemployment. But last week applications for mortgages on new homes were up 17.5% compared to a year ago.

The American economy just got a shocking piece of good news: The job market may be recovering well ahead of schedule. The US unemployment rate surprisingly fell to 13.3% in May, as the economy gained 2.5 million jobs. It was the largest monthly gain in new jobs since the Bureau of Labor Statistics started tracking the data series in 1939.

Geneticists have turned up intriguing links between DNA and the disease. Patients with Type A blood, for example, seem to be at greater risk.

Aston Martin is planning to cut up to 500 jobs from its 2600-strong workforce as part of a £10 million cost-cutting programme in the wake of the coronavirus crisis. The struggling British car maker says that the planned job cuts are intended to help boost profitability by bringing its cost base in line with reduced production levels of its sports car lines.

The coronavirus outbreak could trigger a $25tn (£20tn) collapse in the fossil fuel industry by accelerating a terminal decline for the world’s most polluting companies. A study has found that the value of the world’s fossil fuel reserves could fall by two-thirds, sooner than the industry expects, because the Covid-19 crisis has hastened the peak for oil, gas and coal demand.

More than 50% of Irish respondents to a global survey about drugs and alcohol use say they have seen an increase in the frequency of their drinking since the Covid-19 restrictions were implemented. For the past number of years, TheJournal.ie has partnered with the Global Drug Survey to understand people’s relationship with controlled and uncontrolled substances.

Wells Fargo & Co will stop providing loans to a majority of its independent auto dealer customers due to the economic challenges brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, a spokeswoman said on Tuesday.

Vietnam, a country of 97 million people, has not reported a single coronavirus-related death and on Saturday had just 328 confirmed cases, despite its long border with China and the millions of Chinese visitors it receives each year.

The best COVID-19 response in the world

Italy on Monday launched its COVID-19 contact tracing app based on the Apple-Google Exposure Notification API, becoming one of the first to be available to the public.

Reports of deaths related to the new coronavirus continue to slow in Colorado, with state health officials for the second straight day announcing no new fatalities tied directly to COVID-19 and only two additional deaths of people who had contracted the virus.

The chief executive of the world’s largest hotel company doesn’t expect coronavirus to forever upend the hotel industry. Marriott President and CEO Arne Sorenson hasn’t disguised his thoughts on how negative the ongoing pandemic has been for hotels. He has repeatedly claimed the coronavirus impact on the hotel industry is worse than the 9/11 terrorist attacks and 2008 financial crisis combined. But Sorenson thinks analyst talk of coronavirus forever upending the hotel business model is overblown.

It was 10 p.m. on a Tuesday, and I was watching footage of secret stockpiles of N95 masks, so-called proof-of-life videos sent to me by strangers, when Tim, the juicer salesman, called. “My name is Tim, and I heard you’re looking into VPL,” the man said in a squeaky, nervous timbre. “I distanced myself from the company because they weren’t delivering what they said.”

In response to the continued coronavirus outbreak, Apple and Goldman Sachs are allowing customers to skip their Apple Card payments without incurring interest charges. Apple Card holders should receive an email announcing this “Customer Assistance Program.”

Google rescinded offers for more than 2,000 people who had agreed to work as contractors or temporary employees, The New York Times first reported Friday. In an email viewed by the Times, Google told contracting agencies last week that it has been “slowing our pace of hiring and investment, and are not bringing on as many new starters as we had planned at the beginning of the year.” Google said it would “not be moving forward to onboard” the workers it had brought on through the agencies.

After spending a month in an induced coma due to Covid-19, Dom, a 5-month-old Brazilian baby, gets to go home and celebrate his 6-month birthday. A few months after he was born, Dom was diagnosed with Covid-19 at the Pro-Cardiaco hospital in Rio de Janeiro. He spent 54 days in the hospital -- 32 of them in an induced coma and connected to a ventilator, Dom's father, Wagner Andrade, told CNN.

Empty offices and restaurants in the city of Sydney are driving hungry rats into homes and suburbs, and the loosening of restrictions could create “a new rat plague”, according to a leading rat-catcher. As city centres have closed due to the Covid-19 pandemic, suburban rat infestations have spiked, according to Geoff Milton, a Sydney rat-catcher with 35 years’ experience.

Researchers find coordinated effort to promote conspiracy theory that coronavirus is a bioweapon engineered by China

RIO DE JANEIRO (AP) — With Brazil emerging as one of the world's most infected countries, President Jair Bolsonaro is deflecting all responsibility for the coronavirus crisis

The nose is the probable starting point for COVID-19 infections. Richard Boucher and Ralph Baric at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and their colleagues tracked the ease with which the new coronavirus infects various cell types in the respiratory tract. The researchers found a gradient of infectivity that decreases from the upper to the lower respiratory tract: the most easily infected cells are in the nasal cavity, and the least easily infected deep in the lungs.