We now know how badly jobs have really been affected by coronavirus. It's not just the jobs we thought

The economic flood from the confluence of Donald Trump and coronavirus is here — and it is everything we feared.

The US unemployment rate skyrocketed to 14.7 per cent in April, the highest since 1940 according to the Labor Department on Friday: 20.5 million people lost their jobs.

Today’s new news is the distribution of the job losses — through much more of the economy than we supposed when America’s state governors began imposing stay-at-home orders in March.

We expected devastation in the travel, restaurant and retail industries, which happened. Retail trade, which employed 15.6 million people in March, shed 2.1 million in April. Air transportation dropped 141,000 of 512,000. Food service and drinking places, which shed 417,000 of 12.3 million workers in March, dropped an astonishing 5.5 million. Hotels dropped 839,000 of their 2.1 million workers.

But that’s not even the bad part.

The first bad part is that manufacturers dropped 1.3 million people as companies began investing less and car sales collapsed. Construction dropped 975,000 of its 7.6 million workers — compared to 2.3 million even during the 2008-and-after housing bust. Even healthcare fell apart during a health crisis, as shutdowns on non-emergency procedures and people’s reticence about visiting doctors’ offices caused 1.4 million job cuts.

All those pictures of packed emergency rooms didn’t capture the half-million folks laid off by dentists alone in a single month.

The second bad part is that more is coming next month.

The unemployment rate is based on surveys done the week of April 12-18. So this report includes only partial information about people laid off that week, and none about more recent cuts. The 11 million new claims for unemployment insurance since then represent about 7 per cent of workers, so unemployment will rise in May. This month’s rate is also deceptively low because more than 2 million workers are out of work but not looking for jobs yet, meaning they’re not counted in the unemployment rate.

“I thought unemployment claims might peak at 35 million, but that outcome looks to have the same probability as my winning the lottery,” independent economist Joel Naroff wrote Wednesday. “ Now I am wondering if we will hit 40 million, which would take us to an unemployment rate of 25 per cent or more. That is truly scary.”

Unemployment was 3.5 per cent in February, and 4.6 per cent in Donald Trump’s first month as president. That’s before Barack Obama ruined it by not leaving behind a working test to detect a virus that didn’t exist yet — an argument that, yes, the current President of the United States has actually made.

So what happens now?

First, we brace for the 20 per cent to 25 per cent unemployment soon to arrive. Officials at the Federal Reserve are talking up a third-quarter recovery, but prospects that it will propel us to anything like 3.5 per cent unemployment this year are, ahem, few and weak.

Next, we watch polls. Somehow, Trump’s polling on the economy has improved as the economy has imploded. Most likely this is for two reasons: He’s been yelling for quarantines to end and the affected parts of the economy to reopen, and most voters don’t follow weekly unemployment insurance claims releases. Since they do follow the unemployment rate, now they have data. And unemployment hasn’t been this high since the Great Depression.

So yes, Trump’s polls should take a hit as economic reality sinks in. We’ll see if that’s the correct expectation soon.

But let’s also remember the dead, and those threatened. And with the president pushing to reopen an economy plagued by quarantines and distancing necessitated by initial incompetence in the Oval Office, we need a way to capture the duality of the pain the nation feels, and of the challenges it faces ahead.

Meet the Corona Misery Index.

In the 1960s, economist Arthur Okun coined the term “misery index” after adding up the rates of unemployment and inflation that would more fully capture the squeeze families felt in a 1970s economic crisis that felled Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter (one that looks puny now.)

Today’s misery index might be the sum of the unemployment rate and the number of deaths, in thousands, from Covid-19 in the last month, capturing fears people have both of getting sick and getting suddenly poor. With unemployment at 14.7 per cent and the death toll in April alone having been about 60,000, that yields a Corona Misery Index of 74.7.

"A healthy population is a necessary condition for a healthy economy," Moody's Analytics chief economist Mark Zandi said Friday. "Can’t have one without the other. Risking people’s health by re-opening businesses prematurely is also risking their livelihoods."

The Corona Misery Index should rise when May unemployment comes out, absent a big drop in deaths, which would argue that Trumpian governors in Georgia, Florida and elsewhere are right to argue that it’s time to reopen.

We’ll know they were wrong if the Index rises, as too-quick reopenings of businesses push deaths higher. The Corona Misery Index should fall if the economy comes back in the third quarter, or stagnate if lost income and consumer confidence mean we don’t flock back to reopened car showrooms and restaurants. It will pop if the fall brings the Covid-19 resurgence of which Dr Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, has warned.

Either way, my little creation will provide the first quick measure of how America balances the competing objectives of economic reopening and public safety. Both matter — a lot.

Right now, the US’s Corona Misery Index looks terrible. 74.7? Jesus. In Korea, which had its first corona diagnosis on the same day the US did in January but has lost only 252 citizens, the number is 5.0.