Irish Examiner View: Hard lessons we must absorb - 26m Americans unemployed

Last week alone, 4.4m Americans sought unemployment benefits.

It is natural that our hunger for reliable information is proportionate to the crisis we face.

That hunger sometimes leads to strange places like those who say 5G technology is a conduit to spread the disease to accelerate China’s domination.

Others, and they are not all Americans, suggest that necessary social distancing measures are an affront to their liberty.

There is one metric however that tells the story of the pandemic in the most universal and human way — runaway unemployment figures.

Last week alone, 4.4m Americans sought unemployment benefits.

That figure is climbing so fast that US authorities can give only an estimate for current figures. An estimated 26m Americans have asked for income support since coronavirus changed our world.

Their plight, in a country that can sometimes imagine the mildest state intervention as the vilest Marxism, is unenviable.

So too is the immediate future of the 25% of our workforce that Paschal Donohoe, the finance minister, warned this week will lose their jobs before the summer ends.

He also suggested that trend will quickly reverse once something like normality resumes.

UCC has begun a nationwide survey of the pandemic’s impact on jobs and how we work in the hope that their findings might eventually influence the labour market and welfare policy.

There is a lot of country to be crossed before that point is reached, but the importance of learning the lessons along that way cannot be overstated.