There really is no way to put any kind of gloss on this. From CNBC:

The impact of the coronavirus-induced economic shutdown tore through the U.S. labor market in April at historic levels, slashing 20.5 million workers from nonfarm payrolls and sending the unemployment rate skyrocketing to 14.7%, the Labor Department reported Friday.

Remember, for all the tectonic shifts that the Great Recession brought about, for all the bracing economic trends it accelerated, it never saw unemployment in the United States rise above 10 percent. And that 10 percent was only the worst in 27 years—in 1982, unemployment had actually ticked slightly higher. Now we’ve blown through that previous threshold and then some. Six grim words, often uttered rhetorically, for once are true: the worst since the Great Depression. Take that 14.7 percent and throw in those who are not looking for work, as well as those working part-time for economic reasons, and you approach damn near a quarter of the country. That’s the magnitude of this thing.

What really caught my eye, though, was this:

Average hourly earnings jumped nearly 5% from a year ago, also easily a new record but more reflective of the balance of job losses coming from lower-wage occupations, thus skewing the data.

In other words, there’s a serious class divide running through the numbers. A majority of the jobs shed have come from the hospitality, manufacturing, and construction industries, which employ large numbers of low-wage workers. Here’s more from Justin Wolfers, an economics professor at the University of Michigan:

The pandemic economy is widening existing inequalities.

Change in unemployment rates from Feb to April:
High school dropout: 5.7% -> 21.2%
High school grad (but not more): 3.6% -> 17.3%
Some college: 3.0% -> 15.0%
College (or more) grad: 1.9% -> 8.4%

— Justin Wolfers (@JustinWolfers) May 8, 2020

Is there any silver lining here? Yes, but it’s slender. The peculiar nature of this recession means it may yet prove shorter than the last one, with the economy bouncing back as quarantine restrictions are lifted and businesses remove the “closed” signs from their windows. Also encouraging is that credit markets haven’t frozen up, as they did prior to the Great Depression and Great Recession. Still, with those bright spots come sobering realizations. Reopening the economy now looks less like a jubilee than a slow roll, one that could drag on for months. And demand is likely to lag, as potential customers are slow to resume their normal lives, worried about the virus returning.

The United States is unprepared for another prolonged recession both economically and psychologically. The reason is that we never fully recovered from the last one. The wreckage of 2008 accelerated trends towards automation and offshoring that disproportionately affected the poor and working classes. We still haven’t quite figured out how to deal with those realities, even as new manifestations like artificial intelligence loom on the horizon.

That class divide has spilled protesters into the streets. First, it was Tea Partying taxpayers furious at Barack Obama and the federal government for bailing out Wall Street and then coming for their health care. Next it was Occupy Wall Street picketing the big banks. Then came another mutation: deplorables sticking it to elites, accounted for in part by additional calcifying divisions over cultural views and lifestyles. The thriving economy under Donald Trump purchased little peace in this fight.

Now a fresh grenade has been lobbed into the scrum, with even greater blast potential than the last one. This doesn’t necessarily have to be a right versus left thing: women, African Americans, and Hispanics are all being disproportionately affected by the current downturn. But the result is likely to be a more bifurcated country with even less trust in itself. And right now, that’s about the last thing we need.