In the last two weeks, Americans have experienced a net loss of jobs on scale with the two years of job losses in the Great Recession.

Thursday, the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) reported that a record-breaking 6.6 million Americans filed new claims for unemployment insurance benefits in the week ending March 28, doubling the prior week’s 3.3 million, an eye-popping record that lasted only a week. New claims in each of the last two weeks dwarf any prior week in over 50 years of weekly data (Figure A).

In the two weeks ending last Saturday, about 10 million Americans filed new claims for unemployment insurance. For a sense of scale, the Great Recession reduced total number of U.S. jobs by 8.7 million through 2 years of losses, from 138.4 million in January 2008 to 129.7 million in February 2010. The share of adults employed is now almost certainly below its lowest level since the start of the Great Recession.

Based on Americans’ internet search activity through the first three days of this week, our model predicts that, next Thursday, DOL will report that another 4.7–5.7 million Americans filed new claims in the current week ending tomorrow.

The Great Recession and the current one unfolded very differently. During the Great Recession, job separations—the sum of quits, firings, and layoffs—actually slowed (Figure B: dashed line) but hiring slowed even more rapidly (Figure B: dotted line). In any time period, the difference between the number of separations and the number of hires equals the net change in the number of jobs. Over those two years of net losses, 55.9 million Americans filed new claims for unemployment.

Throughout the Great Recession, new hires counterbalanced a large share of the job losses in any month.

The current labor-market shock is happening differently. It’s not driven primarily by a hiring slowdown but by skyrocketing layoffs. Hiring appears to be slowing as well, along with posted openings, though this is more difficult to observe and slower to show up in any official sources. A simple approximation implies that there may have been as many as 2 million hires over the prior two weeks, implying a net loss of at least 8 million jobs.

These job losses are happening across every state. Table 1 describes the official reports of new claims over the two weeks ending March 28 for each state and for each week separately. Applying the national seasonal adjustment factors would raise these by about 14%. Many states’ UI administrators are struggling to keep pace with the huge surge in demand, which is leading to intake, processing, and reporting challenges. And not everyone who loses work has tried to file for unemployment. So the true scale of labor income loss is undoubtedly larger than even these huge numbers show.

The surge in new claims was not a surprise, but the magnitude is enormous. Americans started searching for the phrase “file for unemployment” at unprecedented rates a couple of weeks ago, as the broad quarantines started and layoffs followed. Search activity rose again last week, above the record high levels of the prior week, as shown in Figure C.

Figure D shows the intensity of search activity by state in the last week, on the vertical axis, against intensity in the prior week, on the horizontal axis. It shows that search intensity increased in many states.

The federal government is the only entity in the country with the borrowing capacity to help families losing massive shares of their income through no fault of their own, as necessary to preserve life and ensure a speedy recovery. Given our failure to stand up wide-scale testing, we cannot distinguish who can work from who requires care and our only option for saving lives is indiscriminate social distancing. We had to put the U.S. economy into a medically induced coma. Without life support systems pumping resources where they need to go, vital parts of our economy will start to fail, diminishing our ability to quickly and smoothly revive.

We must address the public health challenges with every productive resource available, while also preventing families’ finances from deteriorating into desperation. It’s not about stimulus. It’s about survival.