That number is almost of half of the number of people who filed for unemployment benefit check’s several weeks ago….
But ?
30Million + have filed for benefits since the virus crisis began…
We approaching the level of unemployed the country had 90 years ago during the Great Depression …
The American economy IS shrinking….
And will NOT be recovering for a while…
For comparison, 4.4 million people applied for benefits for the week ending April 18, and 30.3 million have sought benefits in the past six weeks alone. That figure represents roughly 1 in 5 American workers.
There is no precedent for figures like this in modern American history.
At first, national attention focused on the unprecedented wave of layoffs tied to restaurant and other nonessential businesses, said Tara Sinclair, an economist at George Washington University and senior fellow of the Indeed Hiring Lab. But it quickly became clear that many more industries were going to be hit by the downturn. Even in the midst of a global pandemic, Sinclair pointed to recent job losses in the health-care industry, as surgeries and other elective procedures are canceled in large numbers….