CNN News:新冠肺炎疫情对经济造成冲击 美国失业人数再创历史新高
Another part of this picture that's getting clearer is the economic impact. There's a jobs report due out Friday morning from the U.S. Labor Department, it will be for the month of March.
And yesterday, economists expected it would show the U.S. lost a hundred thousand jobs and that the unemployment rate — the percentage of workers who didn't have a job would increase to 3.8 percent from its historic low of 3.5 percent.
But there's a catch. The information for that survey is only as recent as the middle of March, and that's before records started being broken for initial jobless claims. This is the number of people who just started asking the government for help because they lost their jobs in layoffs or business cutbacks.
Last Friday, we told you how that number. which accounted for the third week of March, was a record 3.28 million people. Today's figure, which measures the number of initial jobless claims in the fourth week of March, is a new record, 6.6 million people.
Is there a silver lining here?
U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin says when the U.S. defeats the virus, he expects the American economy will recover quickly, with gross domestic products jumping back up and unemployment dropping back down to the way they were before the coronavirus struck. That literally depends on how the recovery shapes up.