April 30, 2020 / SCOTT HORSLEY
Updated at 8:38 a.m. ET
The telephone lines are still jammed at the nation’s unemployment offices.
Another 3.8 million people filed claims for jobless benefits last week, according to the Labor Department. While that’s down from the previous week’s 4.4 million, a staggering 30.3 million have applied for unemployment in the six weeks since the coronavirus began taking a wrecking ball to the U.S. job market.
That’s roughly one out of five people who had a job in February.
The pandemic has cut a wide swath of destruction through the economy, as restaurants, retailers and businesses of all kinds closed their doors in an effort to slow the spread of the virus.
