Unemployment rate rose to 14.7% from just 4.4% in March as the coronavirus pandemic shuttered the global economy
More than 20 million people in the US lost their jobs in April and the unemployment rate more than trebled as the coronavirus pandemic shuttered the world’s largest economy, triggering a financial crisis unseen since the Great Depression.
The Department of Labor announced Friday that the US unemployment rate rose to 14.7% from just 4.4% in March and a near 50-year low of 3.5% in February before the US was hit by the virus.
A decade’s worth of job gains have now been wiped out in under two months. The latest jobs losses are the worst monthly figure on record. The closest comparison came in 1933 when unemployment hit an estimated 25% but that was before the government began publishing official statistics.
The previous peak for unemployment was 10.8% in 1982 and the largest monthly job loss, close to 2 million, came in September 1945 at the end of the second world war, when the country was demobilizing. April’s job losses also easily eclipsed the 800,000 jobs lost in March 2009, the height of the last recession.
The job losses swept across the economy, hitting all industries. Leisure and hospitality lost 7.7m jobs as the sector was hit hard by quarantine measures. But 2.5m jobs were also lost in education and health services, where dentist offices shed 503,000 people. Retail lost 2.1m jobs and manufacturing employment dropped by 1.3m.
Unemployment for African Americans soared from 6.7% last month to 16.7%, wiping out all of the gains made since the last recession. For white Americans unemployment also rose sharply, from 4% to 14.2%. Some 6 million people dropped out of the labor force during the month – meaning they stopped looking for work.
The labor force participation rate – which measures the percentage of the population working or looking for work – dropped 2.5% over the month to 60.2%, the lowest rate since January 1973.
Katie Miller, press secretary to vice-president Mike Pence, has tested positive for Covid-19. With her husband, Stephen Miller. Photograph: Patrick Semansky/Associated Press
Pence's press secretary has coronavirus
The staffer at the White House who tested positive for coronavirus this morning is Katie Miller, Vice President Mike Pence’s press secretary, Donald Trump just confirmed. Katie Miller (nee Waldman) is married to the top adviser to the president, Stephen Miller. The White House strongly defended its efforts earlier to protect Trump and Pence from catching coronavirus.
Document reveals Secret Service has 11 current virus cases, as concerns about Trump’s staff grow
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Multiple members of the U.S. Secret Service have tested positive for COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, according to Department of Homeland Security documents reviewed by Yahoo News.
In March, the Secret Service, which is responsible for the protection of President Trump and other leaders, acknowledged that a single employee tested positive in March. However the problem is currently far more widespread, with 11 active cases at the agency as of Thursday evening, according to a daily report compiled by the DHS.
This report comes as a pair of cases among White House staffers close to Trump and Vice President Mike Pence have put the West Wing’s coronavirus security procedures in the spotlight.
According to the DHS document, along with the 11 active cases there are 23 members of the Secret Service who have recovered from COVID-19 and an additional 60 employees who are self-quarantining. No details have been provided about which members of the Secret Service are infected or if any have recently been on detail with the president or vice president.
The DHS, which oversees the agency, referred all requests for comment to the Secret Service, which in turn declined to comment on the number of coronavirus cases among its employees.
“To protect the privacy of our employee’s health information and for operational security, the Secret Service is not releasing how many of its employees have tested positive for COVID-19, nor how many of its employees were, or currently are, quarantined,” Justine Whelan, a Secret Service spokesperson, said.
While the Secret Service is best known for providing security to the president and vice president, it also protects other leaders, including presidential candidates, former presidents, and visiting dignitaries. The Secret Service also conducts investigations, including most recently, scams involving the coronavirus.
Whelan said the Secret Service is following guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control, but she declined to comment on how many of the Secret Service employees who have tested positive for the coronavirus worked at the White House complex.
the coronavirus measures at the White House complex, which includes both Trump and Pence’s offices, have not necessarily followed the guidelines from the CDC or the president’s own coronavirus task force. Those guidelines include staying 6 feet away from other people, avoiding large gatherings and wearing masks or other face coverings.
On Monday, Yahoo News reported that there are regularly held large events with unmasked attendees in close quarters at the White House — including inside the Oval Office, which is the president’s inner sanctum. Many Secret Service employees on the White House grounds are among those who are not wearing masks. The agency did not respond to questions about why its employees are not wearing masks or whether personal protective equipment is being provided to members of the Secret Service who request it. Pence and Trump have also regularly opted not to wear masks.
White House deputy press secretary Judd Deere responded to questions about coronavirus protocols in the West Wing last week by saying, “Those in close proximity to the president and vice president are being tested for COVID-19.”
“Temperature checks are occurring for all those entering the complex as well as an additional temperature check for those in close proximity to the president and vice president,” Deere said.
While temperature checks were being administered to everyone entering the White House complex, not everyone who entered the Oval Office with the president was given a test. On multiple occasions last week, reporters were brought into the Oval Office without being given tests or being required to wear masks.
Dr. Kavita Patel, a primary care physician who worked in the Obama administration as director of policy for the Office of Intergovernmental Affairs and Public Engagement, said she believes the partial testing for those in the White House complex is not sufficient.
“Having worked in the White House, there’s a ton of people that come in and out of there, and they touch things,” said Patel, a Yahoo News health contributor. “So, unless you are literally testing every individual and then following up … even with wiping down those surfaces every night, it’s not foolproof.”
CNN legal analysts say Barr dropping the Flynn case shows 'the fix was in.'
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National security correspondent Jim Sciutto laid out several reason why the substance of Flynn's admitted lie was a big deal, and chief legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin was appalled. "It is one of the most incredible legal documents I have read, and certainly something that I never expected to see from the United States Department of Justice," Toobin said. "The idea that the Justice Department would invent an argument — an argument that the judge in this case has already rejected — and say that's a basis for dropping a case where a defendant admitted his guilt shows that this is a case where the fix was in."
F.D.A. approves the first home saliva test for the coronavirus.
The Food and Drug Administration said on Friday that it had granted emergency authorization for the first at-home saliva collection kit to test for the coronavirus.
To date, 8.1 million people in the United States have been tested. But public health experts said testing needed to double by the end of May.
The kits must be ordered by a physician and have the potential to widen the audience for virus screening. By keeping symptomatic people home, the spit kits could reduce the risk of infecting health care workers.
The agency has come under fire in recent weeks for allowing myriad companies to offer diagnostic and antibody tests without submitting timely data for review, under its emergency use authorization policy because of the pandemic. Tests have varied widely in terms of their accuracy, and there have been shortages of tests and the materials required to process them.
The F.D.A. said that Rutgers had submitted data showing that testing saliva samples collected by patients themselves, under the observation of a health care provider, was as accurate as testing deep nasal swabs that the health professional had collected from them. The agency said it still preferred tests based on deep nasal samples.
Russia has registered more than 10,000 new coronavirus cases for the sixth day in a row, after emerging as a new hotspot of the pandemic.
A government tally on Friday showed 10,669 new cases over the last 24 hours, fewer than Thursday’s record of 11,231, bringing the total number of confirmed infections to 187,859.
The country also recorded 98 new deaths from the virus, for a total of 1,723, and while some officials are considering softening the current lockdown, the WHO warned Russia is going through a “delayed epidemic.”
Russia now ranks fourth in Europe in terms of the total number of cases, according to an AFP tally, behind countries where the epidemic hit considerably earlier: Britain, Italy and Spain.
Trump: ‘Virus will go away without vaccine’
Donald Trump has alleged that coronavirus is “going to go away without a vaccine”, but warned there could be “flare ups” next year. Speaking to Republican members of Congress on Friday, he did not offer any scientific evidence for that prediction.
