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The country, the most affected by the pandemic in terms of the number of deaths, has now confirmed a total of 1,283,829 cases, the Baltimore-based school reported.
The spokeswoman for the U.S. vice president became the second White House staff member this week to test positive for coronavirus, officials said Friday, even as President Donald Trump was still unmasked in a commemoration of World War II, with veterans over 90 years old.
News that employee Katie Miller had fallen ill raised fears that the White House would risk becoming a viral hotspot just as Donald Trump leads efforts to reduce quarantine measures nationwide that have devastated the economy. biggest in the world.
Miller is a spokesperson for Vice President Mike Pence, giving him frequent access to high-level meetings. She is also married to Trump’s top adviser, Stephen Miller, the writer of speeches behind the administration’s hard-line immigration measures.
A senior administration official initially said only that a Pence staff member had been examined and found to have coronavirus.
Trump, speaking later at an event with Republican lawmakers, identified the person as “Katie” and said he works with Pence as a “press person.” This confirmed multiple reports in the US media that Katie Miller was the person in question.
Recently, on Thursday, Miller was seen mingling with officials at an open-air prayer ceremony hosted by Trump and attended by dozens of people, including Trump and Pence’s wives and many high-ranking officials.
Miller’s positive test interrupted a trip from Pence to Des Moines, Iowa, with six people who may have had contact with her to get off the plane.
“As a precaution, we went back and reviewed all of the person’s contacts most recently,” said the senior administration official, who asked not to be identified.
On Thursday, a Trump spokesman said the aide to the president, a member of the military who is in close contact with the president, had tested positive.
Trump and Pence were tested and confirmed as negative. Both are tested daily.
The United States suffers the largest job loss in history
With stores and factories closed across the country due to the coronavirus pandemic, nearly all of the jobs created in the US economy. USA In the last decade, they were eliminated in a single month.
An unprecedented 20.5 million jobs were destroyed in the world’s largest economy in April, the most ever recorded, the Labor Department said in a report released Friday, the first to capture the impact of a full month of locks.
That brought the unemployment rate to 14.7 percent from 4.4 percent in March, the highest level since the Great Depression of the last century.
The United States is home to the world’s largest and deadliest coronavirus outbreak, with more than 75,000 deaths and 1.2 million cases reported as of Thursday, according to Johns Hopkins University.
The economic damage from locks to contain the virus has been rapid and surprising, despite nearly $ 3 trillion in congressionally approved financial aid, and there is growing fear that temporary layoffs will become permanent as some companies will not survive. .
Altogether, 21.4 million jobs were destroyed in March and April, nearly equal to the 23 million jobs created during the long expansion of the economy from February 2010 to February 2020.
All the main industrial sectors felt the pain.
Leisure and hospitality were the sector’s first hit and suffered the most from the impact of the blockades, cutting 7.7 million jobs, while manufacturing cut 1.3 million jobs.
Those two sectors alone accounted for more than the 8.6 million total jobs lost in the two years of the global financial crisis.
As bad as the data was, the actual image is probably much worse. The Labor Department noted that the unemployment rate would have been closer to 20 percent, but some workers were misclassified as employees when they had actually been fired due to COVID-19.
Not a good future
The pandemic has caused many employees to leave the workforce entirely, while others have been forced to leave the job full time.
The measure of the workforce as part of the total population dropped to 51.3 percent, its lowest level ever, which means that nearly half of working-age Americans are not employed.
Minorities were particularly hard hit: African American unemployment rose to 16.7 percent from 6.7 percent in March, while the Hispanic rate was 18.9 percent, more than triple last month.
President Donald Trump said Friday that the numbers were expected and promised: “I will bring him back.”
“I think it will come back hot,” he told reporters about the economy.
But Sandra Mahesh, 57, who recently lost her Maryland job and had to suspend her unemployment benefits, has no hope.
“I don’t see a good future with the United States at the moment,” he told AFP.
As Trump proclaimed on Fox News on Friday that “even the Democrats don’t blame me” for the job loss, Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden criticized him for his handling of the crisis.
“Donald Trump failed to prepare for this pandemic and was slow to take the necessary steps to safeguard our nation against the most unfavorable economic scenario we are experiencing right now,” Biden said in a statement.
– Low wage destruction –
Echoing the fears of many economists about the fate of small businesses, Biden said: “Many of them will not reopen because they do not have a mattress due to three years of Trump policies that reward larger companies.”
The report showed that average wages increased, but economists say that’s just another sign of catastrophe.
“In April, job losses were disproportionately concentrated in relatively low-wage sectors such as leisure and recreation,” Ian Shepherdson of Pantheon Macroeconomics said in an analysis.
A University of Chicago study based on ADP’s huge private payroll database found that low-wage workers saw a 35 percent decline in employment, a rate three times higher than the nine percent decline seen by the main workers.
The authors found that job losses at the bottom of the pay scale account for a third of the total decline.
“The beginning of this likely ‘pandemic recession’ is unprecedented,” co-author John Grigsby said on Twitter.
“The declines in the labor market (are concentrated) among low-income workers and small businesses, precisely those where they are unlikely to have savings to mitigate the shock.”
This story has been published from a cable agency source without modification to the text. Only the owner has been changed.
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