22 million in one month

It took 10 years for the U.S. economy to create 23 million new jobs. It took the coronavirus pandemic just a month to destroy almost as many.

The government on Thursday reported that another 5.25 million people applied for unemployment benefits in the second week of April, bringing new jobless claims in the past month to 22 million. Extrapolating from the information, Wall Street DJIA, -0.48% economists estimate the unemployment rate has leaped to record 15% or even higher.

The mind-boggling deluge of layoffs suggests the lost jobs nearly match all the employment gains since the end of the Great Recession from December 2007 to June 2009.

The economy didn’t begin adding new jobs until February 2010, eight months after the official end of the last recession. From that point on until February 2020, the U.S. created 23.3 million new jobs.