An additional 4.4 million Americans filed for unemployment benefits last week, according the latest figures from the Labor Department. That means around 26 million people have applied for aid since the novel coronavirus lockdown began five weeks ago. It’s by far the largest and most sudden surge in jobless claims since the Department of Labor started tracking the data in the 1960s. NBC News reported that the latest figures mean all job gains since the Great Recession in the late 2000s have been wiped out—the U.S. economy had created around 22 million jobs since 2010. Economists have predicted that the unemployment rate for April could go as high as 20 percent.
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