A man speaks with a library worker after receiving an unemployment form, as the outbreak of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) continues, in Hialeah, Florida, April 8, 2020.

It took only four weeks for the U.S. economy to wipe out nearly all the job gains in the last 11 years.

The coronavirus and the forced closure of business throughout the country again fueled the number of Americans applying for state unemployment benefits, which last week totaled 5.245 million, the Labor Department reported Thursday.

Combined with the three prior jobless claims reports, the number of Americans who have filed for unemployment over the previous four weeks is 22.025 million. That number is just below the 22.442 million jobs added to nonfarm payrolls since November 2009, when the U.S. economy began to add jobs back to the economy after the Great Recession.

Only 417,000 more U.S. workers need to file for unemployment benefits to erase all nonfarm gains since 2009, a figure likely to be easily surpassed this week.