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Friday, March 27, 2020

3.3 Million!! and other dubious records for the USA

I for one am getting tired of all the "winning" under the illegitimate Trump regime. Today (March 26) we hit two milestones, neither of which is cause to celebrate.

The first biggie is 3.28 million people filed first-time claims for unemployment in the last week. To put this in perspective, with a labor force of 164.6 million, it means that the unemployment rate rose 2.0% in one week. To look at it another way, the previous record for most unemployment claims in a week came in 1982, during the Reagan administration, and that record was 695,000. So this week we surpassed the previous high by a factor of 4.7. For a visual representation, see the tweet below by Heidi Shierholz, the director of policy at the Economic Policy Institute:




This leaves me pretty speechless. So I'll just move on to the second milestone.

On Thursday, the United States moved into the #1 position on the total number of COVID-19 cases of any country in the world, passing both Italy in China in the last 24 hours. In another record, the number of new cases on March 25 was 18,100, breaking China's one-day new case record of 15,100 from February 12. (For those of you keeping score at home, that's six weeks ago!) And unfortunately, the generally rising pattern of new daily cases is continuing, per the Johns Hopkins website.



(Click on "US" at the top of the list of countries at the left, then click on "Daily Increase" on the chart in the lower right-hand corner.)

For good measure, the number of new cases globally hit a record of 61,900 on March 25, also with a continuing upward trend.



This is a disaster in the making if these trends don't improve soon. I don't have a crystal ball, so all I can say is listen to the scientists.