More Americans have lost their jobs since the pandemic started than the entire workforces of the UK, France, or South Korea
- The US is experiencing an unprecedented spike in unemployment — 38.6 million people have filed for unemployment since March.
- The figure is so large that it eclipses the entire workforce of countries like France, South Korea, or the UK.
The coronavirus pandemic has wrought enormous destruction on the US economy — so much that it is a struggle to put it into perspective.
As of last Thursday, the total number of people to file for unemployment in the US in the past nine weeks was 38.6 million.
These are new job losses, and do not include people who weren't working anyway.
38.6 million jobs is economic damage on a scale that is hard to understand. One way is by comparison with other countries.
It is more job losses than if every single worker in any one of the following countries lost their job:
The UK (33.5 million)
Turkey (31.3 million)
France (30.68 million)
Iran (30.5 million)
South Korea (27.8 million)
Italy (25.9 million)
South Africa (22.2 million)
Canada (19.5 million)
The above figures are from the CIA World Factbook and are dated to 2017.
The figures will likely have changed some since then — not least because other countries have also been ravaged by the pandemic.
But no recent shifts will have changed the fundamental comparison — that US job losses in the past few months alone are as severe as a major economy basically vanishing off the face of the earth.