Just a month after posting the worst unemployment rate in recorded history, the Bureau of Labor Statistics found that the unemployment rate actually decreased by 1.4 points in May in a stunning jobs report that superseded all expectations. As models predicted that we wouldn’t see any GDP or employment rebound until the third quarter of the year, economists predicted that the unemployment rate would skyrocket from 14.7% to nearly 20% in May.
Instead, thanks to a partial economic reopening, the economic predictions were all wrong. With a sharp increase in the leisure and hospitality, construction, education, health, and retail sectors, the nation recreated 2.5 million jobs. The clearest and explicit cause of the increase, as detailed by the report, is the reopenings.
But as the BLS makes clear, time is of the essence.
Those who were jobless for five weeks or fewer decreased from a whopping 10.4 million to 3.9 million people. But those who were jobless from five to 14 weeks, presumably those blue-collar workers laid off in the first waves of the shutdown, increased by 7 million people to 14.8 million.
Doctors’ offices and hospitality firms were shockingly able to bounce back after being gutted in April. The shutdown specifically imperiled nonurgent (fallaciously deemed “nonessential”) medical practices, shredding the industry’s profit margins as overworked providers were stuck servicing only coronavirus patients, a feat as unlucrative as it’s been exhausting.
But with the resumption of everything from cancer screenings to Botox, it’s obvious: The partial reopening of the economy saved the healthcare industry. After losing 43,000 jobs last month, the healthcare industry recreated more than a quarter-million jobs.
As made clear by the cross-country protests largely sanctioned by governments and the media, the coronavirus lockdown is over in practice. Thankfully, science is beginning to indicate that given the sunlight’s effect on the coronavirus and the pandemic’s limited capacity to spread outdoors, wearing masks and social distancing is precaution enough for resuming businesses outside. We could reopen everything — not in phases, but immediately, with the correct assumption that businesses and individuals will engage in best practices to limit coronavirus transmission. As a result, we could see one of the greatest economic recoveries in history.
Or, we can wallow and wait for experts who have time and again failed to predict the next steps of the pandemic to decide what phase we can get a haircut in while businesses close their doors for good and spiral the economy into a government-created depression.
The choice is ours, and the jobs report makes the right choice obvious: Reopen everything now.
