The economic damage has been swift and stunning.

In the two years of the global financial crisis, the world’s largest economy lost 8.6 million jobs and the unemployment rate peaked at 10 per cent in October 2009. During the recovery, from February 2010 to February 2020, 23 million positions were created.

The plunge in non-farm payroll employment last month was the largest ever recorded dating back to 1939, while the jobless rate saw its highest and biggest increase dating back to 1948, the report said.

And job losses in March were worse than initially reported, falling 870,000 even though the business closures happened mostly in the second half of the month.

Employment fell sharply in all major industry sectors. Leisure and hospitality was the first sector hit and the one bearing the brunt of the impact of the lockdowns, and posted a loss of 7.7 million jobs.

However, the Labour Department noted that some workers were misclassified in the report as employed when they should have been counted as laid off. Had they been listed properly, the unemployment rate would have been nearly five percentage points higher.

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“It’s fully expected, there’s no surprise. Somebody said, ‘oh look at this,’” he said on Fox News.

“Our country is warriors and maybe now more than ever because they are going back to work.”

And even that double-digit rate underestimates the impact of the virus, since many employees are simply leaving the workforce altogether or have been forced into part-time work instead of full-time.

The measure of the labour force as a share of the total population dropped to 51.3 per cent, its lowest in history, while number of people not in the labour force who currently want a job nearly doubled to 9.9 million.

New claims for unemployment benefits remain at a staggering 33.5 million since mid-March, meaning the jobless rate could go much higher still.

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“We knew it was bad out there but it is looking like it is even worse that we thought,” economist Joel Naroff said in his analysis before the release of the data.

“Now I am wondering if we will hit 40 million (jobs lost), which would take us to an unemployment rate of 25 per cent or more. That is truly scary, as you have to go back to the early 1930s, during the Great Depression, to see anything nearly like that,” he said.

Despite nearly US$3 trillion in financial aid approved by Congress in March alone and trillions more in liquidity provided by the Federal Reserve, there is a growing fear that the temporary shutdowns imposed to contain the spread of the virus will become permanent for many companies.