Kellyanne Conway: Record-high jobless claims are 'shocking but not surprising'
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Counselor to the President Kellyanne Conway told Fox News Thursday that the surge of Americans filing for unemployment as a result of the coronavirus pandemic is “tough.”
“These are shocking but not surprising,” Conway told “Outnumbered Overtime" after the Labor Department announced that 3.28 million Americans had filed for unemployment last week, shattering the previous record of 695,000 in 1982.
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“Everybody warned us that it would be this bad and I think extraordinary, unprecedented times yield unprecedented numbers like this,” said Conway, adding that such times “yields unprecedented measures like the emergency coronavirus stimulus.”
The Labor Department numbers surpassed most estimates of the number of people who applied for unemployment benefits in mid-March , which ranged between one million and 2.25 million Americans out of work.
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The four-week moving average was 1,731,000, an increase of 27,500 from the previous week’s revised average.
Fox News' Megan Henney contributed to this report.