A breathtaking 3 million people filed for unemployment last week as coronavirus shutdowns hit

Daily Kos Staff

Thursday March 26, 2020 · 5:58 AM PDT

2020/03/26 · 05:58

NEW YORK, NY - MARCH 18: A sign in the window announces the closing of the store at Bergdorf Goodman Department store as it sits closed in the wake of the Coronavirus, COVID19, outbreak on March 18, 2020 in New York City. Businesses continued to close days after bars and restaurants shuttered as authorities in New York weighed a "shelter-in-place" order for the entire city. (Photo by Victor J. Blue/Getty Images)

The all-time record for new jobless claims in a single week was set in 1982, with 695,000 new claims. Last week, as coronavirus shuttered many U.S. businesses, 3.28 million people filed for unemployment insurance.

That’s not just breaking a record, it’s shattering it. Reducing it to dust.

BRACE YOURSELF. I have been a labor economist for a very long time and have never seen anything like this. Here are last weekÃ¢ÂÂs initial unemployment insurance (UI) claims. (1/n) pic.twitter.com/fWhljQF9ww

— Heidi Shierholz (@hshierholz) March 26, 2020

The actual number of newly unemployed people is sure to be much worse, former Obama Labor Department official Chris Lu tweeted, for reasons including that gig workers don’t get unemployment insurance and “Some state UI systems have crashed.”

And this isn’t over. More things closed this week than last week, which means that next week’s jobless claims report is likely to be terrible all over again.

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