Bleak new figures Thursday underscored the worldwide economic pain inflicted by the coronavirus: The number of Americans filing for unemployment benefits rose past a staggering 30 million, while Europe's economies are in a record slide.
The statistics are likely to turn up the pressure on politicians to ease the lockdowns that have closed factories and other businesses.
In the United States, government figures showed that 3.8 million laid-off workers applied for jobless benefits last week, raising the total to about 30.3 million in the six weeks since the outbreak took hold.
The layoffs amount to 1 in 6 American workers and encompass more people than the entire population of Texas. Some economists say that when the unemployment rate for April comes out next week, it could be as high as 20 per cent a figure not seen since the Depression of the 1930s, when joblessness peaked at 25 per cent.
And the number of job losses could be even higher than the unemployment claims would suggest, because some people did not apply and others couldn't get through to their states' overwhelmed systems. A poll by two economists found that the US may have lost 34 million jobs.
This is the saddest day for the global economy we have ever seen in the 50 years that economists at High Frequency Economics have been following economic data, they wrote in a report.
The virus has killed more than 220,000 people worldwide, including 61,000 in the U.S., according to a tally by Johns Hopkins University. Confirmed infections globally topped 3.2 million, including 1 million in the U.S., but the true numbers are believed to be much higher because of limited testing, differences in counting the dead and concealment by some governments.