View of the empty Rockefeller Center on April 09, 2020 in New York City. America’s coronavirus epicenter of Ne…Read More
WASHINGTON: Unemployment in America following the coronavirus outbreak soared past 10 per cent on Thursday with 6.6 million new claims filed during the week, topping the 6 million previous week and the 3.3 million the week before. The staggering jobless numbers came even as President Trump and his economic team grappled with restarting the economy amid signs that the pandemic is tailing off due to mitigation efforts, with experts suggesting fine-tuning the efforts in specific areas could allow a gradual return to normalcy.
In fact, key Trump advisors including Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin and White House Economic pundit Larry Kudlow went so far as to say the economy could reopen as early as May, and certainly in four to eight weeks, even as the US fatalities began to peak. American death toll closed at 16,000 on Thursday, but the eventual loss is expected to be well short of the 100,000 projection made last week, with the peak date advanced to April 12, the same Easter Sunday that Trump had wanted to reopen the country for business.
Such has been the scaling down of the death count – attributed to stringent social distancing and lockdown — that some states and cities have drastically revised