As the country went into lockdown in the last week of March, data put together by the Centre For Monitoring Indian Economy, or CMIE shows that the country’s labour indicators worsened and there was a spike in the unemployment rate.

Even before the lockdown, the unemployment rate was dismal and stood at 8.7 per cent for the full month of March. “This is the highest unemployment rate in 43 months. Or, since September 2016. The rate has climbed rather steeply from the 7.16 per cent level of January 2020,” Mahesh Vyas, chief executive officer of CMIE, wrote on the website.

Bloomberg Quint reports that “the unemployment rate during this last week of March was 23.8 per cent. “These yielded an unemployment rate of 23.4 per cent during this week; an LPR of 36 per cent and an employment rate of 27.7 per cent,” Vyas wrote about the data collected by CMIE for the week that ended on April 5.

Even as the virus’ effects on China eases, it continues to wreak havoc in other parts of the world. In the United States, the confirmed cases have touched 400,000 whereas, in the United Kingdom, Prime Minister Boris Johnson is in intensive care even as the country reported its biggest daily rise in deaths.

According to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University, the number of people diagnosed with the disease exceeds 1.4 million and more than 82,000 people have died. However, more than 300,000 people have also recovered.