The Morning Dispatch: Our First Look at What COVID-19 Lockdowns Are Doing to Employment
Happy Friday … except it’s not. The Cubs should be 1-0 right now and tied for first place in the National League Central—but this dang virus postponed Opening Day, the most hallowed of all days for Declan. Now it’s personal.
Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories
As of Wednesday night, there are now 85,840 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the United States (a 24.5 percent increase from yesterday) and 1,296 deaths (a 25.7 percent increase from yesterday), according to the Johns Hopkins University COVID-19 Dashboard, leading to a mortality rate among confirmed cases of 1.5 percent (the true mortality rate is difficult to calculate due to incomplete testing regimens). About 15.5 percent of the 519,338 coronavirus tests conducted in the United States have come back positive, per the COVID Tracking Project, a separate dataset with slightly different topline numbers.
The United States officially surpassed China—a nation with more than four times the population—as the country with the most confirmed coronavirus cases. Many, however, are treating China’s reporting with a healthy dose of skepticism.
More than 3.2 million Americans filed new unemployment claims last week, by far the biggest single-week jump in U.S. history.
