Thursday’s grim jobless report only adds to the urgency of finding safe ways to ease the coronavirus lockdowns: This state of affairs simply isn’t sustainable.

Another 4.4 million Americans filed for unemployment benefits last week, pushing the total for the five-weeks-and-counting shutdown above 26 million with plenty more in sight. We’re headed for pain unseen since the depths of the Great Depression.

Yes, everyone hopes it’ll be temporary, that the economy can bounce back far, far faster than it did in the 1930s. But no one really knows — and the nation’s leaders are running up unprecedented debt just to keep workers and businesses on life support.

That doesn’t mean giving up — if you reopen and let vast numbers of Americans catch the bug, hospitals will be overwhelmed and the elderly population devastated. It means finding ways to ease restrictions without disaster.

Researchers are chasing dozens of potential treatments that could render the coronavirus far less deadly, while the tech industry strives to come up with contact-tracing software that can genuinely slow the virus’ spread — even though you’re typically contagious long before you show symptoms. Scientists are also striving to create vaccines, as well as tests that can be truly mass-scale.

Then, too, everyone will learn from the different approaches taken by different states as they loosen rules in their own ways in coming weeks — and from different nations, as Europe also starts to ease up.

Maybe Georgia will prove that it’s actually not that big a deal to reopen bowling alleys and tattoo parlors. And more eyes will be on Sweden, whose (left-leaning) government never imposed a complete lockdown — which didn’t stop that country from taking a huge economic hit, just like everyone else.

No matter what, lots of normal activity will be no-go for months more: No concerts and no trips to the ballpark, and few among us will go anywhere near an airplane.

New York City faces special challenges: How to keep the virus from spreading in the subways? But answers have to be found.

The latest state data suggest the virus has already hit a fifth of the city’s residents, even as the shutdown has gotten Gotham past its peak. And it’s not an indiscriminate killer: 90 percent of those lost had pre-existing conditions; nearly half of all victims in the city were over 75 — and 95 percent of all COVID-19 deaths in the state were over 50.

So a core issue is how to do a better job of protecting the elderly, especially in nursing homes, than we have so far — even as the healthiest, lowest-risk citizens get to go back to work first.

Reducing the enormous human cost of the lockdowns is every bit as important as minimizing the direct harm from COVID-19.