Over the past two months, the public has become familiar with the term “flatten the curve,” used as a shorthand for the goal of slowing the coronavirus infection rate. The idea has been to prevent the healthcare system from being overwhelmed by too great of a number of patients at the same time. With huge national sacrifices unparalleled since World War II, new cases have plateaued but not declined.

But there is a yet more alarming curve, the upward curve of joblessness, that now needs to be flattened and reversed. In February, the unemployment rate was 3.5%, the lowest for 50 years. In April, it shot up to 14.7%, the worst since monthly records began being kept in 1948. The Bureau of Labor Statistics also reported that 20.5 million people lost their jobs, a record by many orders of magnitude. The worst month of the Great Recession, March 2009, saw 800,000 people lose their jobs.