NEW YORK (AP) — Unemployment in the U.S. is swelling to levels last seen during the Great Depression of the 1930s, with 1 in 6 American workers thrown out of a job by the coronavirus, according to new data released Thursday. In response to the deepening economic crisis, the House passed a nearly $500 billion spending package to help buckled businesses and hospitals.
More than 4.4 million laid-off Americans applied for unemployment benefits last week, the government reported. In all, roughly 26 million people — the population of the 10 biggest U.S. cities combined — have now filed for jobless aid in five weeks, an epic collapse that has raised the stakes in the debate over how and when to ease the shutdowns of factories and other businesses.
In the hardest-hit corner of the U.S., evidence emerged that perhaps 2.7 million New York state residents have been infected by the virus — 10 times the number confirmed by lab tests.
A small, preliminary statewide survey of around 3,000 people found that nearly 14% had antibodies showing they had been infected, Gov. Andrew Cuomo said. Just in New York City, with a population of 8.6 million, Health Commissioner Oxiris Barbot said as many as 1 million may have been infected.
In Washington, many House lawmakers wore face masks and bandannas — and some sat in the otherwise vacant visitors gallery to stay away from others — as they debated the latest spending package. A near-unanimous vote sent it to President Donald Trump in the evening.
Anchoring the bill is the administration’s $250 billion request to replenish a fund to help small- and medium-size businesses with payroll, rent and other expenses. Trump said the bill “will help small businesses to keep millions of workers on the payroll.”
Abroad, there was mixed news about the epidemic. Some countries, including Greece, Bangladesh and Malaysia, announced extensions of their lockdowns. Vietnam, New Zealand and Croatia were among those moving to end or ease such measures.
In Africa, COVID-19 cases surged 43% in the past week to 26,000, according to John Nkengasong, director of the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The figures underscored a recent warning from the World Health Organization that the virus could kill more than 300,000 people in Africa and push 30 million into desperate poverty.
Brazil’s health ministry confirmed 407 deaths due to the outbreak in the last 24 hours, a daily high for the country.
Huge lines have formed at food banks from El Paso, Texas, to the Paris suburbs, and food shortages are hitting Africa especially hard.
At a virtual summit, European Union leaders agreed to set up a massive recovery fund to help rebuild the 27-nation bloc’s ravaged economies. While no figure was put on the plan, officials said 1-1.5 trillion euros ($1.1-1.6 trillion) would be needed.
The coronavirus has killed nearly 190,000 people worldwide, including more than 100,000 in Europe and about 47,000 in the United States, according to a tally compiled by John Hopkins University from official government figures. The true numbers are almost certainly far higher.
In the U.S., the economic consequences of the shutdowns have sparked angry rallies in state capitals by protesters demanding that businesses reopen, and Trump has expressed impatience over the restrictions.
Some governors have begun easing up despite warnings from health authorities that it may be too soon to do so without sparking a second wave of infections. In Georgia, gyms, hair salons and bowling alleys can reopen Friday. Texas has reopened its state parks.
Few Americans count on Trump as a reliable source of information on the outbreak, according to a survey from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. About 23% said they have high levels of trust in what he tells the public, while 21% said they trust him a moderate amount.
On the economic front, few experts foresee a downturn as severe as the Depression, when unemployment remained above 14% from 1931 to 1940, peaking at 25%. But unemployment is considered likely to remain elevated well into next year and probably beyond, and will surely top the 10% peak of the 2008-09 recession.
Janet Simon, laid off as a waitress at an IHOP restaurant in Miami, said she has just $200 in her name and is getting panic attacks because of uncertainty over how she will care for her three children. Simon, 33, filed for unemployment a month ago, and her application is still listed as “pending.”
“I’m doing everything to keep my family safe, my children safe, but everything else around me is falling apart,” Simon said. “But they see it, no matter how much I try to hide my despair.”
Corey Williams, 31, was laid off from his warehouse job in Michigan a month ago and saw his rent, insurance and other bills pile up while he anxiously awaited his unemployment benefits. That finally happened on Wednesday, and he quickly paid $1,700 in bills.
“It was getting pretty tight, pretty tight,” he said. “It was definitely stressful for the last few days.”
While the health crisis has eased in places like Italy, Spain and France, experts say it is far from over, and the threat of new outbreaks looms large.
“The question is not whether there will be a second wave,” said Dr. Hans Kluge, the head of the WHO’s Europe office. “The question is whether we will take into account the biggest lessons so far.”
German Chancellor Angela Merkel criticized some German states for moving too briskly in trying to reopen their economies. Germany has been praised for its approach to the pandemic and has a much lower reported death toll than other large European countries.
“We’re not living in the final phase of the pandemic, but still at the beginning,” Merkel warned. “It would be a shame if premature hope ultimately punishes us all.”
Governments are bearing that risk in mind with the onset of Ramadan, the holy month of daytime fasting, overnight festivities and communal prayer that begins for the world’s 1.8 billion Muslims with this week’s new moon. Many Muslim leaders have closed mosques or banned collective evening prayer to ward off infections.
The virus has already disrupted Christianity’s Holy Week, Passover, the Muslim hajj pilgrimage and other major religious events.
Authorities in the capital of Indonesia, the most populous Muslim-majority nation, extended restrictions to cover all of Ramadan. Turkey banned communal eating during the holiday.
Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan bowed to the country’s clerics, refusing to close mosques despite doctors’ warnings that such gatherings could further spread the virus in a country with a fragile health care system.
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Garcia Cano reported from Washington, and Charlton from Paris. Associated Press reporters from around the world contributed.
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Follow AP coverage of the pandemic at http://apnews.com/VirusOutbreak and https://apnews.com/UnderstandingtheOutbreak
26 million have sought US jobless aid since virus hit
Apr 23, 2020 12:17PM
WASHINGTON (AP) — More than 4.4 million laid-off workers applied for U.S. unemployment benefits last week as job cuts escalated across an economy that remains all but shut down, the government said Thursday.
Roughly 26 million people have now filed for jobless aid in the five weeks since the coronavirus outbreak began forcing millions of employers to close their doors. About one in six American workers have lost their jobs in the past five weeks, by far the worst string of layoffs on record. That’s more than the number of people who live in the 10 largest U.S. cities combined.
Economists have forecast that the unemployment rate for April could go as high as 20%.
The enormous magnitude of job cuts has plunged the U.S. economy into the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s. Some economists say the nation’s output could shrink by twice the amount that it did during the Great Recession, which ended in 2009.
An urgent question for the unemployed is how quickly the economy may rebound. Most economists expect some employers to start rehiring within months, though significant job gains aren’t considered likely until later in the year.
Few experts foresee a downturn anywhere near as long as the Great Depression. During the Depression, unemployment stayed high for nearly a decade, with the jobless rate remaining above 14% from 1931 all the way to 1940. But unemployment is considered likely to remain elevated well into next year and probably beyond.
The painful economic consequences of the virus-related shutdowns have sparked protests in several state capitals from crowds insisting that businesses be allowed to reopen. Thursday’s report, showing that the pace of layoffs remains immense, could heighten demands for re-openings.
Some governors have begun easing restrictions despite warnings from health authorities that it may be too soon to do so without causing new infections. In Georgia, gyms, hair salons and bowling alleys can reopen Friday. Texas has reopened its state parks.
Yet those scattered re-openings won’t lead to much rehiring, especially if Americans are too wary to leave their homes. Most people say they favor stay-at-home orders, according to a survey by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs and believe it won’t be safe to lift social distancing guidelines anytime soon. And there are likely more layoffs to come from many small businesses that have tried but failed to receive loans from a federal aid program.
The number of people who are receiving unemployment benefits has reached a record 16 million, surpassing a previous high of 12 million set in 2010, just after the 2008-2009 recession ended. This figure reflects people who have managed to navigate the application systems in their states, have been approved for benefits and are actually receiving checks.
Women make up a majority of workers in some industries that have been hit hardest, such as health care, where many jobs outside hospitals have been lost, and hotels and restaurants. Heidi Shierholz, an economist at the progressive Economic Policy Institute, calculates that 56% of the layoffs have involved women.
“As in all recessions, job loss in this recession is not being meted out equally,” Shierholz said.
African-Americans and Latinos are typically among the first to be laid off in recessions. Though the government doesn’t track the jobless claims data by gender or race, a survey by the University of Southern California found that 21% of African Americans and 18% of Latinos say they have lost jobs in the past month, compared with 15% of whites.
One factor in that disparity is the ability to work from home. A study by the Center for American Progress found that whites are more than twice as likely as blacks to say they can work from home and 50% more likely than Latinos.
Just about every major industry has absorbed sudden and severe layoffs. Economists at the Federal Reserve estimate that hotels and restaurants have shed the most jobs — 4 million since Feb. 15. That is nearly one-third of all the employees in that industry.
Construction has shed more than 9% of its jobs. So has a category that includes retail, shipping and utilities, the Fed estimated.
Europe’s economies, too, are headed for severe recessions, with surveys of economic activity released Thursday hitting all-time lows. The downturn is putting at risk up to 59 million jobs — 26% of employment in the European Union — according to McKinsey, the consulting firm. That figure includes people who could be laid off outright as well as those who are still on payrolls but might be put on shorter work hours or furloughs.
Unemployment is also likely to rise in the United Kingdom. Analysts at Capital Economics say the U.K. economy is headed for its biggest quarterly economic contraction in more than a century.
In Florida, applications for unemployment benefits nearly tripled last week to 505,000, the second-highest total behind much-larger California’s 534,000. Florida has had trouble processing many of its applications. Its figure suggests that the state is finally clearing a backlog of filings from jobless workers.
In Michigan, 17% of the state’s workforce is now receiving unemployment aid, the largest proportion in the country. It is followed by Rhode Island at 15%, Nevada at 13.7% and Georgia at 13.6%.
“This has been a really devastating shock for a lot of families and small businesses,” said Aaron Sojourner, a labor economist at the University of Minnesota.
A federal relief package enacted last month made millions of gig workers, contractors and self-employed people newly eligible for unemployment aid. But most states have yet to approve unemployment applications from those workers because they’re still trying to reprogram their systems to do so. As a result, many people who have lost jobs or income aren’t being counted as laid-off because their applications for unemployment aid haven’t been processed.
Among them is Sasha McVeigh, a musician in Nashville. Having grown up in England with a love of country music, she spent years flying to Nashville to play gigs until she managed to secure a green card and move permanently two years ago. McVeigh had been working steadily until the city shut down music clubs in mid-March.
Since then, she’s applied for unemployment benefits but so far has received nothing. To make ends meet, she’s applied for some grants available to out-of-work musicians, held some live streaming concerts and pushed her merchandise sales.
By cutting expenses to a bare minimum, McVeigh said, “I’ve managed to just about keep myself afloat.” But she worries about what will happen over the next few months.
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AP Writers Travis Loller in Nashville and Pan Pylas in London contributed to this report.