Coronavirus pandemic in the US

In February, the US unemployment rate was near a 50-year low of 3.5%. In April, it skyrocketed to 14.7%, the highest level ever recorded since 1948 when the government began tracking the monthly data.

The road back to a healthier labor market will be painful, said Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell during a virtual event at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.

It will be particularly painful because recently hired and lower-paid workers are the ones bearing the brunt of the pain, Powell said.

The unemployment rate will probably peak "over the course of the next month or so," he added, and it's reasonable to expect a decline in the unemployment rate after. This decline might even be sharp, but US unemployment will likely remain well above the lows seen at the start of the year.

The California State University system canceled most in-person classes through the fall semester.

This decision was based on concerns around class sizes due to social distancing guidelines and the ability to perform tests and contact tracing, according to Eduardo M. Ochoa, President of California State University, Monterey Bay.

“We were also very concerned about our ability to do testing and tracing of contacts,” he added. “Frankly, the prospect of bringing students from across the state and across the country to converge on little Monterey County, we face the prospect of turning the campus into a cluster that would actually single-handedly drive infection rates in our county. We didn’t really want to do that.”

The health experts expect coronavirus to rebound in the fall and winter, “so we want to be able to provide our students and their families with sufficient planning time,” according to Soraya Coley, President of Cal Poly Pomona.

“We also want to use this as an opportunity to review what we’ve done in the last several months, and to use this summer to be very intentional about providing the kind of quality education that the state system is known for," Coley said.

Virtual education, she says, “is different. It does not mean that it is less quality.”

Stocks fell at the open as investors digested comments from Federal Reserce Chair Jerome Powell, who said significant risks remain in the economy and recovery isn't here yet.

Here's how the markets opened:

The price of food staples, such as eggs, meats and cereal, climbed in April as more Americans stocked up on food during the coronavirus pandemic.

Food prices for groceries recorded its biggest increase since February 1974, rising 2.6%, according to the Labor Department on Tuesday.

The price index for eggs climbed more than 16% — the biggest increase for any food item.

The increase was broad-based, with all six major grocery store food groups increasing at least 1.5% over the month, according to the the Bureau of Labor Statistics .

Meanwhile, prices of other industries are tumbling: The grocery numbers stand in contrast to the broader trend in US prices, where prices fell by 0.8% on a seasonally adjusted basis in April, marking the largest drop since December 2008.

That's an alarming drop, dragged down primarily by falling gasoline and energy prices. But excluding volatile food and energy, prices still fell by 0.4%. That's the largest monthly decline in the so-called core consumer price index since the BLS began tracking the data in 1957.

Some context: Economists expected the coronavirus crisis to have a largely deflationary effect. The April data is proof of that. That's bad news for policy makers at the Federal Reserve, who like to keep inflation at around 2% — widely accepted as the ideal balance for the US economy.

The coronavirus crisis has devastated the US economy over the past weeks — and the "scope and speed of this downturn are without modern precedent," according to Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell.

It's "significantly worse than any recession since World War II," the Fed chief said in prepared remarks at a virtual event hosted by the Peterson Institute of International Economics.

Powell noted the country has already erased almost all the job gains of the last decade, and the labor woes are hurting low-income families in particular.

Almost 40% of households earning less than $40,000 a year as of February lost their jobs in March, he added, citing a forthcoming Fed survey.

New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell announced that the city would reopen in a "very slow" manner starting Saturday.

"Based on the guidance of our health care professionals, we are where we need to be to slowly reopen the city," she said yesterday. "If we do not do well in this first phase, we will not be going to any other phase." 

Phase 1 will start at 6 a.m. on Saturday. At that time...

During this phase, the city is mandating residents to wear face coverings in public. Close contact businesses — such as spas, massage parlors and tattoo shops — will not be allowed to reopen in phase one, according to Cantrell. 

You could be singing, cheering on your favorite sports team at a match or just talking loudly. But in any of these cases, the coronavirus can spread fairly rapidly, according to Erin Bromage, a biology professor at UMass Dartmouth.

He cautioned against being in noisy and crowded indoor spaces — especially if there is poor air circulation.

When singing, he said “you are pushing a lot of air out. And it expels a lot more respiratory droplets into the air.”

When it comes to talking, “normal talking releases a certain amount of respiratory droplets. And the louder you talk, the more you release," he said.

So in an environment where people are talking loudly, it just means there will be more respiratory droplets in the air if there are infected people around, he said.

Bromage also said that sports arenas need to be thought through.

“It is not like a single person in an arena can infect everybody. But if you’re yelling and screaming and supporting your team, those people in the spray zone of your voice, you know, you’re putting them in danger," he said.

Watch:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi defended the new Democratic proposal for $3 trillion in coronavirus relief, saying the sweeping plan embodies “what we think this country needs.”

About the package: The plan largely reflects Democratic priorities, and as it was not the product of bipartisan negotiations with the Senate, it is not expected to advance past the House. It is expected to cost more than $3 trillion, dwarfing the stimulus measure enacted in March, which was more than $2 trillion and at the time amounted to the largest emergency aid package in American history.

“I don’t call it a wishlist,” Pelosi said today. "I call it an American wishlist."

“It’s a big ticket. It’s a lot of money. The American people are worth it,” she added.