US lost a record 20.5M jobs in April

The country lost 20.5 million jobs in April — the highest number recorded since the US Bureau of Labor Statistics began keeping track of employment levels in 1939.

The coronavirus has the US economy coughing up a lung.

The nation lost a record 20.5 million jobs in April as the pandemic caused the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, the government said Friday.

The mass layoffs sent the unemployment rate up to 14.7 percent — the highest recorded since the US Bureau of Labor Statistics started tracking it in 1939.

The job losses reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics destroyed the previous record of nearly 2 million, set in September 1945 in the wake of World War II. The largest monthly loss during the Great Recession was just 800,000 in March 2009.

“Today’s jobs report shows that shutting down the US economy will create deep and long-lasting scars for America’s labor force,” said Josh Lipsky, director of programs and policy at the Atlantic Council think tank.

Still, the numbers were slightly better than the gloomy expectations of economists, who predicted a loss of 22 million jobs and 16 percent unemployment.

This was the first edition of the closely watched monthly report to broadly capture the impact of the coronavirus crisis, which has forced businesses across the country to shut down to protect the public’s health.

It illustrates how quickly the pandemic has crippled a US economy that was humming along nicely just two months ago, when unemployment was sitting at a 50year low of 3.5 percent — before the nation’s nine-year hiring streak came to an abrupt end in March.

But the labor force could be even weaker than the stats let on, experts warned.

The unemployment rate doesn’t capture the millions of people who weren’t looking for work. And issues with how certain workers were classified may have depressed the rate by nearly 5 percentage points, according to the US — suggesting it could actually be higher than 19 percent.

“It doesn’t come close to capturing the reality, which is probably much worse,” Curt Long, chief economist and vice president of research at the National Association of Federally-Insured Credit Unions, told The Post.