OREANDA-NEWS. Over the past week, more than 3.2 million Americans filed first applications for unemployment amid a coronavirus epidemic and government measures to control the spread of infection, a statement released by the US Department of Labor says.

For the week ended March 21, the number of initial applications for unemployment, seasonally adjusted, was 3,283,000, the message reads. This is more than four times higher than the previous record of 695 thousand registered in 1982. The Department notes that an increase is more than 1000 % compared with the figure for the previous period.

Last week, such high rate was foretold by Bank of America, one of the country’s largest credit institutions.