Just a couple of weeks ago, Cassi Key had three jobs. Now she has none.

Key, 27, was a museum educator, teacher and private tutor in Orange County, Calif. She was laid off from the museum job in mid-March when the whole facility shut down due to the coronavirus. The school laid her off a few days later, and her tutoring income dried up as clients disappeared.

All of her jobs were part-time, and Key has no health insurance.

An emergency-room visit earlier this year left her with more than $5,000 in medical bills, and she has just a small amount of savings left—money she had put aside for a car—to see her through this crisis. It might last two or three months, she figures.

Millions of Americans have been blind-sided by layoffs in recent weeks. But Key, to a far greater extent than most, saw the pandemic coming. She used to teach English in Wuhan, China, where the coronavirus originated. “I was hyper aware of it” as it first took hold in that city, she says, and was concerned it could spread to the U.S.

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There was little she could do to cushion the blow to her career and her finances. “I know I’m going to go through my savings,” she says, “and it’s very frustrating.”

A record 3.28 million people filed initial unemployment claims in the week ending March 21, according to the U.S. Labor Department. That figure may be significantly understated, as some state employment offices’ websites and phone lines have been overwhelmed, leaving would-be filers out in the cold.

The New York State Department of Labor said in a tweet Wednesday that it received more than 1.7 million calls last week from residents filing unemployment claims, while California governor Gavin Newsom said that 1 million residents had claimed a need for unemployment insurance since March 13.

Beneath the low unemployment numbers of recent years lies a disturbing long-term trend that hints of the pain to come.

Over the past 30 years, 63% of the new production and non-supervisory jobs created have paid below-average weekly wages, according to the U.S. Private Sector Job Quality Index, developed by researchers at Cornell Law School. Many workers have been forced into relatively low-wage, low-hours jobs in service sectors such as retail and leisure and hospitality as goods-producing sectors of the economy have shrunk, according to the Index. Now workers in these public-facing jobs are left vulnerable as the pandemic shutters shops, restaurants, hotels and other businesses.

See:Here’s how to track the mounting damage to the economy from the coronavirus

Job losses are likely to soar as social distancing takes its toll, economists say. Nearly 67 million people have jobs in food preparation, sales, production and other fields that are at high risk of layoffs due to social distancing measures, according to the St. Louis Federal Reserve.

Among them is Marivic Vasquez, 39, a physical therapist in Nassau County, NY. This past weekend, the outpatient clinic where she worked shut down, and she was laid off. “People were afraid to come in, and we didn’t really have any personal protective equipment,” Vasquez says. Many patients came to the clinic for rehabilitation after surgeries, but with elective surgeries being canceled, Vasquez says, it’s not clear how quickly patients will return even after social distancing measures are relaxed. It’s “hopefully just a furlough, but I’m not sure if I’ll have a company to come back to,” she says.

Even people with diverse income sources are seeing all of their work dry up. Martha Bishop, 54, of Whately, Mass., is a bookkeeper and a doula who is employed to provide guidance and support to a pregnant woman during labor. She has lost all but one of her bookkeeping clients. One was an events company that no longer had any events to plan, while others have postponed the work. And her doula work came through an agency that has suspended all in-person services. In both lines of work, she says, the collapse has “just been overnight. I went from rapidly growing to completely dead.”

Indeed, many workers have been stunned by how quickly their employers turned out the lights.

“The swiftness with which it occurred was pretty alarming,” says a Harrison Township, Mich., journalist laid off last week when his Detroit-area newspaper company suspended publication and who asked not to be named for fear it could damage his chances of getting his job back. Closure of non-essential businesses “basically puts us out of commission, because our publication runs major-ly on ad revenue,” he says. His wife, meanwhile, who runs her own marketing business, has lost about 50% of her clients, he says.

Only a month or so ago, the jobless rate was near a 50-year low. That’s when Yasmin Torres, 18, moved from Puerto Rico with just a backpack full of belongings and started a new life in Arlington, Tex. She quickly found a full-time job she loved in a day care center. But like the broader economy, she has suffered a harsh reversal of fortune since then. She was laid off in mid-March. “That job was very important to me,” she says. “I’m shaking now, I’m so nervous.” Now she’s on the hunt for any sort of income, whether it’s from babysitting, house cleaning, or dog-sitting, but “not many people are hiring,” she says.

Other laid-off workers say the coronavirus severely limits their ability to find other work.

Some, like the physical therapist Vasquez, have skills that aren’t marketable in a time of social distancing. Others find that the only available jobs involve public interaction that could put members of their household at risk. “There have been some grocery store chains hiring, and I’m slightly hesitant to apply,” Key says, because she lives with her boyfriend and his mother, who has health conditions that could make her vulnerable to the virus. “I’m terrified,” she says, of making her sick.

More than half of U.S. households have no emergency savings account to help them through a crisis, according to a 2019 report by AARP Public Policy Institute.

Bishop, the bookkeeper and doula, has already stopped paying her credit card bills so she can focus on paying the rent. Her landlady is retired, “and she depends on my rent so she can eat,” Bishop says. Vasquez’s husband Ariel, a construction project engineer, fears he could also be laid off, and if that happens, the couple say they’ll have savings to last only three or four months. Torres, meanwhile, is living with her brother and trying to stretch her final paycheck as far as it can go. “I have such little to my name right now,” Torres says, “I cry myself to sleep just thinking about money.”