About 22 million Americans have filed unemployment claims in the past month

Amid the coronavirus crisis, more than 20 million Americans have filed jobless claims within the past month.

The Labor Department on Thursday said another 5.2 million Americans filed initial unemployment claims last week, slightly above the 5 million that economists had forecast.

This was down from the 6.6 million filings reported last week but brought the number of jobless claims to about 22 million over the past four weeks, "nearly wiping out all the job gains since the Great Recession," CNBC notes. Prior to the coronavirus crisis, the record for most unemployment filings in one week since the data started to be tracked was 695,000 in 1982.

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"This is the deepest, fastest, most broad-based recession we've ever seen," economist Diane Swonk said, per The New York Times.

Ahead of the Thursday numbers, CNBC reported that the filings may "be peaking," and CNBC's Eamon Javers writes that "a lot of observers were privately braced for something even worse." But the number was still staggering, and it brings the total claims over the past month to about 13 percent of the labor force, CNN reports.

Some economists, The Associated Press reports, "say the unemployment rate could reach as high as 20 percent in April," and The Washington Post reports the National Association for Business Economics says it's "expected remain close to 10 percent through the end of the year, meaning 1 in 10 people would still be out of work at the holidays."