Hoping to contain the economic devastation, President Donald Trump said earlier this week that he’d like normal economic activity to resume by April 12 . But with confirmed cases of the novel coronavirus exceeding 60,000 and deaths topping 1,000 — and rising — most health experts consider that unlikely.

Peter Navarro, the White House’s director of trade and manufacturing policy, told Fox News that the high volume of unemployment claims “is totally expected” because of the administration’s push for social distancing to limit the spread of the virus.

“We put public health above economics in the very, very short run,” Navarro said. “This is no surprise. This is expected, and we should accept the news because we are doing what we need to do to combat the virus.”

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, however, dismissed the figure entirely, telling CNBC in a phone interview that the number of claims “right now are not relevant.”

Earlier Thursday, before the latest numbers were released, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell said the economy “may well be in a recession.”

But “there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with our economy,” he said on NBC’s “Today.” “People are being asked to step back from economic activity … so in principle, if we get the virus spread under control fairly quickly then economic activity can resume.”

The largest chunk of new unemployment claims came from Pennsylvania, which saw an estimated 378,908 claims last week. Ohio and Texas reported an estimated 187,784 and 155,657, respectively.

States hit particularly hard by the virus also reported some of the highest number of claims. In California, where more than 2,100 people have tested positive for the virus, there were 186,809 new claims last week.

That number only covers the first few days after the state’s mandatory stay at home order went into effect on March 19. Gov. Gavin Newsom said this week that more than 1 million unemployment claims had been filed in California since March 13, and the state received an average of 106,000 new claims per day during the past week.

Processing delays could account for the discrepancy. California’s Employment Development Department confirmed the figure it reports to the federal government is the number of claims processed each week, rather than the total number of claims received.

llinois — which has seen 1,865 cases of Covid-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus — reported 114,663 new unemployment claims.

In New York, home to half of the country's coronavirus cases, initial filings for unemployment increased last week from 66,062 to 80,334.

New York’s Department of Labor has struggled to process claims in that time frame, however, potentially obscuring some of the impact there. New York received more than 1.7 million calls from those seeking to file claims last week.

The department said on March 19 it was seeing a 1,000 percent increase in claims in some areas and averaging 250,000 logins per day on its website, prompting a push to hire 200 additional staff after upping its server capacity and dedicating 700 people to answering calls.

A $2 trillion Senate coronavirus package passed late Wednesday would beef up unemployment assistance to the states by lengthening the coverage for unemployed workers and offering an extra $600 per week on top of their state unemployment benefits.

However, the additional help from the federal government may be insufficient to keep afloat state unemployment reserves that never recovered from the Great Recession. New York, California, Texas, Ohio, and Illinois will still have to pay out part of the unemployment benefits.

The House is expected to vote on the package Friday.

Thursday's Labor Department numbers on unemployment claims, which covered the week ending March 21, were the first strong indication that the economy is in free fall, although the report for the week ending March 14, showing a one-third increase to 281,000 new claims, signaled what was ahead.

Economist say the U.S. can expect the numbers to get worse. Next Thursday’s report covering unemployment claims from this week will likely be “at least as bad,” according to EPI’s Shierholz. “We’re in for it. We’re going to see a lot of job loss.”

The Labor Department's jobs report on April 3 is expected to cast further gloom, with rising unemployment and job growth possibly vanishing altogether. EPI estimates the economy will lose 14 million jobs by the summer.

Ian Kullgren, Marie J. French, Myah Ward, Katy Murphy, Gary Fineout and Katherine Landergan contributed to this report.