The U.S. unemployment rate soared over 14.7 percent in April as the COVID-19 fallout continues to ripple through the country, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported on Friday.

The coronavirus lockdown wiped out 20.5 million U.S. jobs in April, destroying nearly all the positions created in the prior decade in the world's largest economy, while the number of initial jobless claims in the country surpassed a staggering 33 million in the last seven weeks. 

And job losses in March were worse than initially reported, falling 870,000 even though business closures mostly happened in the second half of the month.

The plunge in non-farm payroll employment was the largest ever recorded since 1939, while the jobless rate was the highest and the biggest increase since 1948, the report said.

Employment fell sharply in all major sectors, with particularly heavy job losses in leisure and hospitality, the first sector hit and the one bearing the brunt of the impact of the lockdowns.

The Labor Department noted that the some workers were misclassified in the report as employed when they should have been counted as laid off. Had they been listed properly, the unemployment rate would have been nearly five percentage points higher.

The data on the jobs market has become so bad so fast that there are no comparisons.

Statisticians in the Labor Department's Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), which produces the monthly unemployment report, are using natural disasters as a point of reference.

"The closest that we have in terms of what was in our playbook has been usually hurricanes, because they tend to be large and impact significant periods of time, or areas," BLS Associate Commissioner Julie Hatch Maxfield said earlier.

But even devastating events, like Hurricane Katrina in 2005, were regional – not national and certainly not global.

Employment in the private sector alone collapsed 20.2 million last month, U.S. payroll services firm ADP said Wednesday. 

Any luck ahead?

However, U.S. President DonaldTrump played down the unprecedented new unemployment rate as "no surprise" after the report came out.

The economic crisis is unquestionably spelling trouble for President Trump's bid for a second term in the White House in November's election. 

After the Trump administration was widely criticized for its slow, inefficient response to the pandemic, Trump is eager to reopen the economy despite a continued rise in COVID-19 infections and dire projections of deaths and pins the blame on the World Health Organization.

"Our economy is on life support now. We will be testing the waters in the next few months to see if it can emerge safely from our policy-induced coma," said Erica Groshen, a former commissioner of the Labor Department's Bureau of Labor Statistics and now a senior extension faculty member at the Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations.

The U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) shrank by 4.8 percent in the first quarter of 2020, marking the worst dive since the fourth quarter of 2008 when the number was recorded at 8.4 percent, with sharp declines in consumer spending, nonresidential fixed investment, exports and inventories. 

(With input from AFP)