More than twenty-four million US workers have applied for unemployment benefits in the last five weeks. That figure represents more than one in seven workers. For comparison, in pre-coronavirus times, one million workers applied in a five-week period.

A freeze on normal economic activity is necessary to keep as many people home as possible and stop the spread of the virus. But mass economic devastation is not an inevitable result.

In Western and Northern European countries, for example, governments have taken aggressive action — often at the urging of the Left and labor unions — to protect workers’ jobs during the crisis so they’ll be waiting for them when it’s safe to return to business as usual, and providing adequate relief in the interim. Researchers at the Economic Policy Institute call this approach “deep-freezing the economy,” the idea being that it can be thawed out and quickly restored when the pandemic is over. Yes, it costs money, but so does an interminable economic slump.