Starting March 21, nearly 30 million Americans have applied for unemployment benefits. New data from the Department of Labor emphasized the pressure exerted on the state government to resume working hours.
To date, the number of unemployed is more than 18.4% of the US population of working age, which has not been observed since the Great Depression of the 1930s.
Along with growing economic difficulties reaching historical proportions, agitation is intensifying in order to weaken the regime of mandatory restrictions. For the second time in two weeks, hundreds of protesters, including members of armed militia groups, gathered at the Michigan State Capitol in Lansing, demanding the cancellation of Governor Gretchen Whitmer’s orders for self-isolation.
A few weeks after he insisted that he had “full” power to decide when and how to resume the country’s economy, President Donald Trump to a large extent granted the right to each governor to make decisions on an individual basis.
Although the White House refused to renew its leadership on resumption of work on April 16, which recommended an economic restart in stages only after the introduction of strict precautions, medical experts said that these conditions remained unsatisfied and that premature actions could lead to a resumption of the outbreak.
They insisted that the safe removal of social distance rules would require a significantly expanded virus scan and the means to track close social contacts of infected people so that they too could be checked and isolated.
As of Thursday, the number of known infections across the country has reached more than 1 million, including more than 62,000 deaths, which far exceeds the death toll in American wars for all the years of US military involvement in Vietnam.