New Jobless claims were “only” 3.17 million today. That sounds great because it’s half the number 5 weeks ago. Of course, it’s **5** times the maximum number before this recession started.
In total now, there have been 33 million claims in 7 weeks. It took almost 75 weeks – 10 times longer – to hit the number of claims during the last two recessions.
The question is now how long until claims slow down to “normal” levels and employment begins to increase again.
More and more states are starting to reopen here in the US. Even California will begin “Stage 2” reopening Friday (May 9). Let’s see how we are doing compared to Italy.
It’s pretty clear we are running well behind Italy in terms of curbing cases of COVID-19 in the US.
The potentially more concerning part is testing. While testing has ramped up, it is no where near the number of tests that the U.S. would need for test and trace.
The only good news is that for 5 states that have reopened, while the total number of cases remains near the peak, there has not been an explosion in new cases.
We’ll see what happens as states reopen.