What you need to know today about the virus outbreak

A record-long streak of U.S. job growth ended suddenly in March after nearly a decade as employers cut 701,000 jobs because of the coronavirus pandemic that’s all but shut down the U.S. economy. The unemployment rate jumped to 4.4% from a 50-year low of 3.5%.

Global stocks declined Friday after soaring U.S. job losses tempered enthusiasm about a possible deal to stabilize oil prices amid anxiety over the global economic decline.

What’s happening today

— Does another 2008 Great Recession or even a 1930s-like Great Depression loom in the U.S.? It seems almost certain after nearly 10 million Americans lost their jobs and applied for unemployment benefits in the past two weeks — a record high that reflects the near-complete shutdown of the U.S. economy. Here’s what you need to know if you’ve just lost your job.

— A funeral home owner speaks of both the ″surreal″ and the painfully real as he and others in the same line of work struggle with more deaths than ever: They’re a father, they’re a mother, they’re a grandmother. They’re not bodies. They’re people,” he said. His company is equipped to handle 40 to 60 cases at a time, without a problem. On Thursday morning, it was taking care of 185.

— A makeshift intensive-care unit in northeastern Spain looks nothing like the hospital library it once was. Inside, the tension is palpable. Medical workers are underequipped and wearing improvised protective gear as they treat the critically sick.

— U.S. States are bidding against each other to obtain the desperately needed medical devices from private manufacturers. This comes as the Federal Emergency Management Agency has nearly 10,000 ventilators sitting idle.

— The Trump administration is formalizing new guidance to recommend that many Americans wear face coverings in an effort to slow the spread of the new coronavirus, as the president is aggressively defending his response to the public health crisis.

In other news

Musicals at home: Composer Andrew Lloyd Webber is making some of his filmed musicals available for free on YouTube. On Friday, “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat” will be streamable followed a week later by the rock classic “Jesus Christ Superstar.”

Hope in blood: Doctors around the world are dusting off a century-old treatment for infections: Infusions of blood plasma teeming with immune molecules that helped survivors beat the new coronavirus. There’s no proof it will work, but former patients in Houston and New York were early donors, and now hospitals and blood centers are getting ready for potentially hundreds.