6.6 million people in the US filed for unemployment last week — the highest number of initial claims in history.
Italy, G The coronavirus pandemic death toll in Spain passed 10,000 on Thursday, as the country reported its highest number of deaths in a single day since the outbreak began, with the total rising by 950 to 10,003 among 110,238 infections.
The US - the world's hardest-hit country - recorded a total of 5,151 coronavirus deaths, according to data collected by Johns Hopkins University. It has confirmed more than 217,000 cases of the disease.Germany and Pakistan have prolonged their lockdowns.
Another 569 coronavirus deaths were declared in the UK today, meaning Britain's death toll has quadrupled in six days with 2,921 confirmed victims of the deadly infection.
The rise makes today the worst day so far in the outbreak - which has crippled Britain since it began spreading on British soil in February. It is the third day in a row that a new one-day high in deaths has been recorded.
The figures provide a glimmer of hope that the unprecedented lockdown may be working because it the number of new cases was down from 4,324 yesterday, while the daily death count jumped by just six.
Figures show the UK's COVID-19 death toll - which leading scientists warned could have topped 500,000 without drastic Government action - was just 759 last Friday.
It came as Health Secretary Matt Hancock emerged from self-isolation tonight to announce a U-turn on the testing fiasco, saying he wants to use independent labs so everyone can get swabbed.
He admitted the UK won't be testing 100,000 people a day until the end of the month and revealed some antibody tests he was being urged to buy had failed trials - with one missing three out of four cases.And the NHS has announced more victims in four days this week (1,693) than in every other day of the outbreak combined up until Sunday, March 29 (1,228).
The true scale of the outbreak is not shown by the Department of Health's statistics, which cut off at 5pm the day before they are announced.
Because of this, some of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland's statistics will be taken into tomorrow's overall count for the UK.
Combined, each country's individual death tolls for the day - England (561), Scotland (66), Wales (19) and Northern Ireland (6) - add up to 652.
This takes the real total to 2,977, and individual numbers of positive tests put the patient count at 39,215.Experts have stressed that fast rising numbers of infections and deaths do not mean that the UK's lockdown isn't working.
People dying in intensive care yesterday, for example, are likely to have caught the virus two, three or even more weeks ago - before the Stay Home campaign began.
If testing rates remain the same, the first thing to drop will be the number of new infections as fewer people become ill in the first place.
After that, the number of people being admitted to hospital will fall, according to cancer doctor Professor Karol Sikora, and then, finally, the number of people dying will come down, too.
The process of catching the infection to dying can take two to three weeks or longer for each patient who succumbs to the illness.
Professor Keith Neal, infectious diseases expert at the University of Nottingham, said: 'These figures are much in line with expectations.
'There is continuing evidence that the social distancing measure put in place on the 16th and then 23rd of March could be having an effect in slowing the rate of increase of new infections.
'The current social distancing needs to be maintained and it is also a reminder that not only the old and those with underlying conditions can get severe disease.'
NHS England said its own patients who died were between 22 and 100 years old.
44 of them were otherwise healthy, with the youngest patient with no underlying conditions being just 25. A 100-year-old victim also did not have any other illnesses.
One factor which could change the UK's statistics in the coming days and weeks is the pressure the Government is coming under to test more people.
Public Health England, which is managing all COVID-19 testing across around 48 laboratories, tested 7,771 people for the coronavirus yesterday - a total 10,657 tests.
But critics are calling on authorities to ramp this up significantly and routinely test all NHS staff and then move on to testing the public and not just hospital patients.=
Drive-through screening stations have been set up for NHS workers only in London and have so far tested around 2,800 medical staff.
UNITED STATES
The US was the first country to report 1,000 coronavirus deaths in a single day on Wednesday as the death toll soared past 5,000.
With more than 216,000 infections across the country, America is now worse affected by COVID-19 than any other country in the world has been.
The virus shows no signs of slowing down, despite the entire nation being on lockdown, and experts say as many as 200,000 will die by the time the pandemic is over.
There are fears that the next epicenter will be the city of Detroit, after the death toll in Michigan doubled in just three days - a sign of exponential growth which scientists use as an indicator of spikes.
The US death toll is now dwarfing the number of deaths officially reported in China (3,309), where the outbreak first originated back in December.
While the death toll in Italy (13,155) and Spain (9,387) is still higher, the US eclipsed the hard-hit European nations' confirmed cases, with both Italy (110,574) and Spain (104,118) reporting only around half the number of infections.
Italy's deadliest day was on March 26th, when 969 new deaths were reported. China's figures are less clear.
Contemporaneous reports indicate that its deadliest day was in February when 242 died in Hubei province alone. There is growing skepticism over the country's reported deaths and infections, with some saying the government is hiding the true number.
Michigan now has the third highest death toll in the US after reporting a spike in its figures in the last couple of days.
The state's death toll had reached 337 on Wednesday night - an increase of 78 - with more than 9,300 confirmed cases. Last week, its death toll increase was around 4.3
New Jersey is second behind New York with 355 deaths and 22,255 infections. New York continues to bear the brunt, with 84,025 infections and 2,219 deaths.New York City rushed to bring in more medical professionals and ambulances and parked refrigerated morgue trucks on the streets to collect the dead.
Boroughs outside of Manhattan have been hardest hit, according to a New York City Health Department map which breaks down the city's coronavirus cases by zip code up until March 31.
The map revealed that the city's poorer neighborhoods are being hardest hit by the pandemic, while rich New Yorkers in the likes of Greenwich Village and Brooklyn Heights are not being infected to the same level.
Elmhurst and Kew Gardens Hills in Queens, the South Bronx, and East New York in Brooklyn have the most cases of the areas across the city.
In Rockaway, Queens, 436 have tested positive among the community that lives in public housing in Far Rockaway but at the far end of the island, residents in their $1million Belle Harbor homes only have 143 cases.
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio drafted in some support Wednesday, appointing controversial former NYPD Commissioner James O'Neill as the city's COVID-19 Senio Advisor.
