Happy Birthday to me. I just turned 23 while still stuck in quarantine. I don't find it boring.

I built five trails today, three lawns yesterday, and NPR politics made the best company.

A deepest thanks to the NPR politics team and NPR team at large as we can't leave out Scott

Horsley in these Victor Hugo reminiscent times. This podcast was recorded at 209 p.m. on Thursday, April 2nd.

Things may have changed by the time you hear this. So go blow 15 minutes doing some more research after the show.

Well, lucky for you, we've got ourselves a little Scott Horsley in the podcast today.

And if you sing that timestamp twice, you'll know you've washed your hands properly.

That woman is way more productive than I will ever be during isolation, man. I'm impressed.

Hey there. It's the NPR politics podcast. I'm Susan Davis. I cover Congress.

I'm Scott Horsley. I cover the meltdown of the economy.

I'm Danielle Kurtz-Lavin. And I too cover the meltdown of the economy.

And the meltdown of the economy is where we start today with some pretty dismal economic news.

Nearly 10 million Americans have filed for unemployment in just the last two weeks.

New reports out today shows 6.6 million Americans filed for unemployment last week.

Double the record that was set the week before. Scott, Danielle, put this into some context for us.

Well, not only is it double the week before, it's about 10 times what we saw during the worst week of the Great Recession.

It's remarkable in both the scope of the job cuts, but also the speed at which they've happened.

I mean, we've just slammed on the brakes in this economy deliberately in an effort to control the coronavirus.

One economist I talked to likened it to what happened along the Gulf Coast when Hurricane Katrina blew through.

But this is a medical hurricane that is blanketing the whole country.

Right. And I mean, one additional thing to add here, of course, as was the case with last week's numbers,

if there were folks who couldn't get through to their state unemployment claims systems this week or last week,

...