NEARLY 3.2 million laid-off workers applied for unemployment benefits in the US last week as the business shutdowns caused by the coronavirus outbreak deepened the country’s worst economic crisis in decades.

Roughly 33.5m people have filed for jobless aid in the seven weeks since Covid-19 began, forcing millions of companies to close their doors and slash their workforces.

That is the equivalent of one in five Americans who had been employed back in February, when the unemployment rate had reached a 50-year low of 3.5%.

Today, Donald Trump’s government will issue the April jobs report, and it is likely to be the worst since modern record-keeping began.

The unemployment rate is forecast to reach at least 16%, the highest rate since the Great Depression, and economists estimate that 21 million jobs were lost last month.

If so, it would mean that nearly all the job growth in the 11 years since the Great Recession ended has vanished in a single month.

Even those stunning figures will not fully capture the magnitude of the damage the coronavirus has inflicted on the job market.

Many people who are still employed have had their hours reduced, while others have suffered pay cuts. Some who lost jobs in April and did not look for a new one will not be counted as unemployed.

A broader measure – the proportion of adults with jobs – could hit a record low. The official figures for jobless claims may also be under-counting lay-offs.

Surveys by academic economists and think tanks suggest that as many as 12 million workers who were laid off by mid-April did not file for unemployment benefits by then, either because they could not navigate their state’s overwhelmed systems or they felt too discouraged to try.