COVID-19 has unemployment higher than Great Depression and Great Recession

Logan Bowers
MC301 Contributor

The Coronavirus pandemic has unexpectedly changed our perception of “normal” since the United States’ President Donald J. Trump declared a national emergency on March 13, 2020. Scientists all over the world are in a hurry to deliver a vaccine to eradicate the disease.

Businesses have failed and many have lost jobs. In fact, unemployment numbers in the U.S. are the highest they have been since the Great Depression, according to an article on the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy (CIDRAP) website written by Stephanie Soucheray.

In the article Soucheray stated that the country has lost 20.6 million jobs since mid-March, resulting in an unemployment rate of 14.7 percent.

Soucheray also reported that unemployment numbers have not been this high since the Great Depression of the 1930s, and they have also more than doubled the numbers that were recorded during the Great Recession of 2007 through 2010, resulting in 8.7 million lost jobs in America, Soucheray said in the article.

The Pew Research Center also reports that unemployment among all worker groups increased steeply in the COVID-19 recession. This study found that unemployment among several groups in the COVID-19 outbreak varied significantly.

According to the study, the unemployment rate for women and men in May 2020 differed by 2.4 percent. The unemployment rate for women in May 2020 was at 14.3 percent, while the unemployment rate for men was at 11.9 precent. Comparatively, the unemployment rate for women during the 2007 recession maxed out at 9.4 percent in July 2010, while the men’s unemployment rate at the same time peaked at 12.3 percent.

Looking at the differences in unemployment rates for men and women during both recessions, as well as looking back on how different jobs were affected during both recessions, Kochhar explains the reason for why the numbers were higher for women in the COVID-19 recession and why the numbers were higher for men during the 2007 recession.

Rakesh Kochhar, the author of the study, stated that one of the reasons that women have seen a larger rise in unemployment during the COVID-19 recession is that they make up the majority of workers in hospitality sectors of businesses and educational services. Kochhar contrasted that job loss in the Great Recession was more centered around construction and manufacturing roles, which were mostly made up of male workers.

Unemployment has been a major issue during the Coronavirus pandemic this year. The numbers have proven to be significant, as they trump those of the Great Recession as a whole and have not been seen this high since the Great Depression.

With President Trump declaring a vaccine within weeks at the Oct. 22 debate and some scientists estimating a vaccine arrival later into 2021, the final outlook for unemployment numbers is yet to be determined.