Global economic news bleak
NEW YORK: Bleak new figures have underscored the worldwide economic pain inflicted by the coronavirus: the number of people filing for US unemployment benefits has climbed past a staggering 30 million, while Europe’s economies have gone into an epic slide.
And as bad as the numbers are, some are already outdated because of the lag in gathering data, and the true economic picture is almost certainly much worse.
In the US, the government reported that 3.8 million laidoff workers applied for jobless benefits last week, raising the total to 30.3 million in the six weeks since the outbreak took hold.
Some economists say that when the US unemployment rate for April comes out next week, it could be as high as 20% — a figure not seen since the Depression of the 1930s, when joblessness peaked at 25%.
There was grim new data across Europe, too, where more than 130,000 people with the virus have died. The economy in the 19 countries using the euro shrank 3.8% in the first quarter of the year, the biggest contraction since the eurozone countries began keeping joint statistics 25 years ago.
France’s economy shrank an eyepopping 5.8%, the biggest quarterly drop since 1949. In Spain, the contraction was 5.2%. Germany is projecting that its economy, the eurozone’s biggest, will shrink 6.3% this year.
Unemployment in Europe has reached 7.4%, the statistics agency Eurostat reported.
However, big jobprotection programmes run by governments are temporarily keeping millions of Europeans on payrolls, sparing them from the monumental layoffs the US is reporting.
‘‘This is the saddest day for the global economy we have ever seen,’’ in the 50 years that economists at High Frequency Economics have been following the data, they wrote in a report.
Even then, the statistics do not capture the enormity of the economic crisis. The quarterly figures cover January through March, and many of the lockdowns in Europe and the US were not imposed until March — the second half of March, in a multitude of places in the
United States.
The virus has killed more than 230,000 people worldwide, including more than 61,000 in the US, according to a tally by Johns Hopkins University.
Confirmed infections globally topped 3.2 million, with 1 million of them in the US, but the true numbers are believed to be much higher because of limited testing, differences in counting the dead and concealment by some governments.
Dr Anthony Fauci, the US government’s top infectious diseases expert, said he expected federal approval for the first drug to prove effective against the coronavirus to happen ‘‘really quickly’’. Remdesivir, made by Gilead Sciences, hastened the recovery of Covid19 patients in a major government study, and it might also have reduced deaths, according to Fauci.
Also in the US, a 1000bed navy hospital ship that arrived in New York City to great fanfare a month ago left town after treating just 182 patients. The surge of cases there has fallen well short of the doomsday predictions. The 24hour number of deaths statewide was down to 306, the lowest in a month.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson said Britain was ‘‘past the peak’’ and ‘‘on a downward slope’’ in its coronavirus outbreak. At his first news conference in more than a month following a bout with Covid19, Johnson said he will present a timetable next week for easing the country’s lockdown.
Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin (54) said he had tested positive for the virus and would go into isolation. — AP