The jobless claims are mounting as the federal government struggles to release waves of aid to the economy and businesses shutter. The Federal Reserve on Thursday unveiled emergency programs that could dole out more than $2 trillion in loans to businesses of all sizes, as well as to struggling state and city governments. Democrats and Republicans in the Senate clashed Thursday over a new aid package aimed at bolstering the $2 trillion economic rescue deal that lawmakers approved in March.

The 16.8 million unemployment claims, filed between March 15 and April 4, translate to more than one in 10 workers seeking jobless benefits. “We are nowhere near the end of this,” tweeted Heidi Shierholz, policy director at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. “The labor market has been upended.”

State unemployment agencies and the Department of Labor continued to struggle to process claims from a pool of eligible workers that now includes gig workers, independent contractors and workers who in ordinary times wouldn’t have worked long enough to qualify for benefits, but became eligible as a result of Congress’ $2 trillion coronavirus rescue package last month. That bill also increased employment benefits by $600 across the board.

The 6.6 million claims filed last week would have set a record going back to 1967, when the Labor Department’s data series began, had the previous two weeks’ claims not done so already.

“This is a catastrophe,” said Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.), vice chairman of the congressional Joint Economic Committee, in a statement. “Nearly 17 million Americans have lost their jobs and they likely won’t find another one until the contagion is under control — and that may be a long way off.”

The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported last week that U.S. employers shed 701,000 jobs in March, pushing the unemployment rate up to 4.4 percent, but the survey week for that figure was mid-March, before the crush of claims began. Most estimates put the current unemployment rate in the double digits or close to it.

As policymakers struggled to come to terms with the economic fallout from the pandemic, one economist suggested last month’s expansion of unemployment benefits, including $600 added to every unemployment check through July, could blunt losses from mass layoffs.

Although the unemployment rate “could rise even higher over the coming months,” wrote Andrew Hunter, senior U.S. economist at Capital Economics, “the damage in terms of lost income may end up being less severe.”

DOL again attributed the jump in claims to the spread of Covid-19, the illness caused by the novel coronavirus. In previous weeks, the agency said the claims were concentrated in the services industries, as well as the health care, manufacturing, retail and construction industries.

The greatest number of new unemployment claims were in California, which processed an estimated 925,450 claims last week. America’s most populous state was an early hot spot for the coronavirus’ spread across the country.

Gov. Gavin Newsom said Wednesday that California had processed 2.4 million applications in the three weeks since mid-March, accounting for more than 12 percent of the state’s civilian workforce.

After California, Georgia was second with 388,175 new claims filed last week.

New York — the current epicenter of the outbreak in the U.S., with more than 149,000 Covid-19 cases — reported more than 345,200 new unemployment claims, according to the federal data.

Although that number is lower than the roughly 366,600 filings two weeks ago, the state government’s failure to process a deluge of inquiries clouded the total count of jobless New Yorkers.

Since March 9, New York has received 800,000 unemployment claims and processed about 600,000 of those filings, Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s office said Thursday. The state’s new online system to apply for unemployment compensation is scheduled to go live later Thursday evening.

In New Jersey, the state Department of Labor reported an all-time record of nearly 215,000 residents filed for unemployment benefits last week, bringing the state’s claims to nearly 577,000 for the three-week period that began March 15.

After New York, New Jersey has the most confirmed cases of Covid-19 in the country — more than 47,000 — and Gov. Phil Murphy has warned the state could soon experience a wave of infections similar to those seen in New York City.

The unemployment figures showed Florida was slightly less hard-hit, with 170,000 claims filed last week in the nation’s third largest state, a decrease from the record 228,000 residents who sought unemployment benefits two weeks ago.

The actual number of Floridians out of work is likely higher, however, as technical glitches with the state’s unemployment benefits website have left the overloaded online system inaccessible for tens of thousands of residents.

The pandemic’s international economic toll was also laid out in devastating detail Thursday in Canada’s latest federal employment report, which revealed America’s neighbor to the north lost more than a million jobs in March.

That decline, which represented 5.3 percent of the jobs in a country of 37 million people, helped drive Canada’s unemployment rate from 5.6 percent in February to 7.8 percent — its largest one-month increase since comparable data became available in 1976.

Joe Anuta, Andy Blatchford, Gary Fineout, Katherine Landergan and Katy Murphy contributed to this report.