The heart-stopper in Thursday's employment numbers is what it heralds for Australia's youth.
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In one month, 600,000 jobs disappeared, but the pain was not equally felt.
The figures bring home the reality that this is a crisis that kills older people but destroys the livelihoods of younger people.
More than a third of those suddenly without work are aged 15-24. In that group, there were 213,500 fewer jobs in April than March.
The number of people in jobs in that group fell almost 11 per cent. In comparison, the number of people employed in the 45-54 age group fell 2.4 per cent.
It's not just a blip. Brendan Coates at the Grattan Institute says the lesson of previous recessions is that the impacts on young people last for the longer term.
A decade later after a recession, the youth still have lower levels of employment and lower pay and are less likely to be in jobs that use their skills.
"So while we're all in this together, younger workers are feeling much more of the pain than older workers," he says.
"And the real risk is that those younger workers, if they don't get into the labor market, will be those that are hurt by long term scarring."
Chris Richardson, from Deloitte Access Economics, makes the same point.
"There is clearly an age component and that's an age-old story in any downturn. It's the young workers who get kicked the hardest," he says.
"There is a raft of evidence that unemployment hurts, and it hurts more the longer it goes on and it hurts the young the most."
While the overall unemployment rate increased from 5.2 per cent to 6.2 per cent from March to April, youth unemployment jumped to from 11.5 to 13.8 per cent.
For people aged 45-54, the increase was just 0.2 per cent, from 3.8 to 4 per cent.
There is a raft of evidence that unemployment hurts - and it hurts more the longer it goes on, and it hurts the young the most
- Chris Richardson
The unemployment rate, though, "obscures the pain", as Coates says, because it doesn't include the people who aren't officially part of the labour force - they're not looking for work because there is none to look for, or they're still officially employed but not actually working.
People on the government's JobKeeper wage subsidy, covering more than five million workers, are treated as employed even if they are not working.
More people worked zero hours than in any April for 20 years, the Bureau of Statistics says.
More than 17 per cent of working females, and more than 11 per cent of working males worked no hours. That's about 430,000 women and 330,0000 women working but not working. In April last year, the figures were 9 per cent and 6 per cent.
In all, 2.7 million people experienced the first-hand jobs pain of the coronavirus.
Nine hundred thousand people lost their jobs, one million people lost hours of work, and 750,000 had zero hours of work.
Overall, hours worked were down 9.2 per cent. The "under-utilisation" rate, which includes unemployment and underemployment, is now at 20 per cent.
For young people, it hit 37.3 per cent, well over twice the under-utilisation rate among 45-54s (15.2 per cent).
The Bureau of Statistics says if the 500,000 extra people not in the labour force because there was no work to look for had been included, the unemployment rate would have been 9.6 per cent.
This is within expectations. Treasury forecasts an unemployment rate of 10 per cent in the June quarter.
Commonwealth Bank analysts now predict the rate will peak at 9 per cent.
But it is, as Prime Minister Scott Morrison said, nevertheless "terribly shocking".
And that is why he is now so focused on trying to jam the gear-stick into hard reverse and convince the states that its safe to open up again.
As the government reviews its JobKeeker wage subsidy, Labor is pushing for it to be expanded.
They want it to include more casual workers, pointing out that the industries with the highest numbers of casuals, such as restaurants, pubs, retail, entertainment and the arts, are the hardest hit by the crisis with large numbers of workers missing out on the wage subsidy.
The casuals in these businesses are missing out because they haven't been with the same employer for a year or more, or because they are from countries other than Australia and New Zealand.
These are also the industries with young workers at a crucial juncture.
But rather than extending the scheme, which has proven troublesome in parts, the government's preference is to get the economy moving again.
The problem for Morrison is that when he says he wants 850,000 back in the workforce by July, the numbers depend on states and territories implementing all of the easing steps.
Some of these feel quite extreme from the standpoint of lockdown, such as groups of up to 100 allowed in venues and international students jetting back.
The jobs also depend on businesses being able to reopen and having the confidence to re-employ in most precarious times.
More uncomfortably still, the jobs for the young people look set to mean the lives of some old people.