More than 40 million Americans have filed unemployment claims during the coronavirus crisis

The number of unemployment claims filed in the United States during the coronavirus crisis has now reached a staggering total of more than 40 million.

The Labor Department on Thursday said another 2.1 million initial unemployment claims were filed last week, which brings the total over 10 weeks to 40.7 million, The New York Times reports.

This was the tenth week in a row that weekly unemployment claims totaled more than one million, NBC News notes. Prior to the coronavirus crisis, weekly unemployment claims had never passed one million before; the record was 695,000. The number of first-time claims has, however, declined for the past eight weeks, per The Associated Press.

The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

Join more than 350,000 subscribers and keep yourself informed with a selection of The Week’s most interesting, enlightening and entertaining stories - plus daily puzzles.

Join more than 350,000 subscribers and keep yourself informed with a selection of The Week’s most interesting, enlightening and entertaining stories - plus daily puzzles.

Sign up

This unfortunate milestone comes less than 24 hours after another grim milestone, as on Wednesday, the United States hit 100,000 confirmed COVID-19 deaths, according to the tally from Johns Hopkins.

Bloomberg notes, though, that "continuing claims, which tally Americans' ongoing benefit claims in state programs, fell to 21.1 million" for the week ending on May 16, whereas analysts were anticipating an increase. The U.S. unemployment rate in April reached 14.7 percent, the worst since the Great Depression.