News Desk :
Global fatalities from coronavirus reached 2,71,995 with total cases 39,54,826 in 210 countries and territories while recovered 13,61,994, according to worldometer.
The United States is home to the world’s largest and deadliest coronavirus outbreak, with 76,996 fatalities and 12,93,893 cases reported as of Thursday, according to Johns Hopkins University.
With shops and factories closed nationwide due to the coronavirus pandemic, nearly all of the jobs created in the US economy in the last decade were wiped out in a single month.
An unprecedented 20.5 million jobs were destroyed in April in the world’s largest economy, driving the unemployment rate to 14.7 percent compared to
4.4 percent in March, the Labor Department said in its monthly report, the first to capture the impact of a full month of the lockdowns.
The economic damage has been swift and stunning.
In the two years of the global financial crisis, the world’s largest economy lost 8.6 million jobs and the unemployment rate peaked at 10 percent in October 2009. During the recovery, from February 2010 to February 2020, 23 million positions were created.
The plunge in nonfarm payroll employment last month was the largest ever recorded dating back to 1939, while the jobless rate saw its highest and biggest increase dating back to 1948, the report said.
And job losses in March were worse than initially reported, falling 870,000 even though the business closures happened mostly in the second half of the month.
Employment fell sharply in all major industry sectors. Leisure and hospitality was the first sector hit and the one bearing the brunt of the impact of the lockdowns, and posted a loss of 7.7 million jobs.
However, the Labor Department noted that some workers were misclassified in the report as employed when they should have been counted as laid off. Had they been listed properly, the unemployment rate would have been nearly five percentage points higher.
President Donald Trump said Friday the numbers were expected, and promised: “I’ll bring it back.”
“Our country is warriors and maybe now more than ever because they are going back to work,” he said on Fox News.
Deaths from the COVID-19 epidemic in Italy climbed by 274 on Thursday, against 369 the day before, the Civil Protection Agency said, while the daily tally of new infections declined marginally to 1,401 from 1,444 on Wednesday.
The total death toll since the outbreak came to light on Feb. 21 now stands at 29,958, the agency said, the third highest in the world after the United States and Britain.
The number of confirmed cases amounts to 215,858, the third highest global tally behind the United States and Spain.
People registered as currently carrying the illness in Italy fell to 89,624 from 91,528 the day before.
There were 1,311 people in intensive care on Thursday, down slightly from 1,333 on Wednesday and maintaining a long-running decline. Of those originally infected, 96,276 were declared recovered against 93,245 a day earlier.
The agency said 1.564 million people had been tested for the virus against 1.550 million the day before, out of a population of around 60 million.
Spain reported 1,095 new coronavirus cases in the last 24 hours, the biggest increase in nearly a week, as the country goes through the first phase of a plan to relax its lockdown after eight weeks of confinement. The total number of cases, adjusted to include changes in data for the Madrid region, rose to 222,857, according to health ministry data. Fatalities rose by 229 to 26,299.
That compares with an increase of 213 on Thursday. The government on Friday is set to approve a new extension of the national state of emergency through May 23rd, after parliament authorised it on Wednesday.
Prime minister Pedro Sanchez has said that enhanced powers are needed to co-ordinate the country’s health services – under normal circumstances 17 regional governments run health care separately. Barcelona beaches opened for a short window from 6 am to 10 am on Friday to allow people to swim and jog. People paddled on boards and swam in the water under the supervision of police.
