US Employment Plunges In March Amid Coronavirus Damage

As the US economy craters amid the damage inflicted by the coronavirus shutdowns, 701,000 jobs were jettisoned in March and the unemployment rate surged to 4.4 percent, the Labor Department reported Friday

Washington, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 3rd Apr, 2020 ) :As the US economy craters amid the damage inflicted by the coronavirus shutdowns, 701,000 jobs were jettisoned in March and the unemployment rate surged to 4.4 percent, the Labor Department reported Friday.

Yet the government acknowledged it could not yet capture the full extent of the damage, and economists say the April report is set to be dramatically worse.

The latest report details the worst job loss since the depths of the global financial crisis in March 2009 and the biggest single-month jump in the jobless rate in more than 45 years, and comes after weekly unemployment benefit data showed 10 million people lost their jobs in the last two weeks of the month.

With COVID-19 cases topping a million worldwide, a quarter of which are in the United States where the death toll is over 6,000, cities have turned into ghost towns and officials are struggling to find ways to ease the ruinous damage to the economy and individuals.