At long last, the president declared a national emergency on Friday that took aim at some of the specific repercussions of the coronavirus pandemic. And Congress is moving forward with its own, smaller package.

But we need much more, specifically, a large injection of broad fiscal stimulus, ideally through a simple one-time payment to all Americans.

Let’s first acknowledge that the United States may well already be in a recession. Prediction markets now put a 73 percent probability on a downturn, up from 23 percent just one month ago. On Thursday, the stock market dipped — albeit briefly, at least for the moment — into bear market territory, almost always a precursor of recession.

Economists are quickly agreeing. JPMorgan now estimates that the nation’s economy is likely to shrink by 2 percent in the first quarter and another 3 percent in the second quarter. That would equate to a downturn on the magnitude of what occurred in the early 1990s, when unemployment rose by 2.8 percentage points.