By NPR
No fewer than 26 million people have been forced out of jobs in five weeks by the rampaging novel coronavirus in America.
The number continues to soar because of the lockdown as another 4.4 million people claimed unemployment benefits last week around the country, the Labor Department said.
The total is more than all the jobs added created in the past 10 years since the Great Recession.
Still the pace of job losses is slowing. About 5.2 million filed during the week that ended April 11 and last week was the third consecutive week of declines.
The coronavirus crisis has suddenly ended a decade of remarkable job growth. The unemployment rate, which sank to nearly 50-year lows, is expected to soar into double digits.
The pace of job losses has the broader population worried. A Gallup poll found that a quarter of working Americans believe they will lose their jobs in the next 12 months. That’s a record high.
The wave of job cuts were concentrated at first in the travel and energy sectors, but have increasingly spread to white-collar jobs such as lawyers, accountants and consultants.
“The lack of precedent means we have no idea how far this will go, but our initial hope that claims would drop below one million per week by the end of May is now touch-and-go,” says Ian Shepherdson, chief economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics.
To stem the flow of layoffs, Congress created the $349 billion Paycheck Protection Act, which gives companies money if they retain or rehire workers.
The fund ran out of money in just two weeks and the Senate approved a bill this week to replenish it.
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