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Nearly 17 million US workers lost their jobs or saw their wages decline since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic in early 2020, a report said.

This is the figure as of October this year, Xinhua news agency quoted the report published by the Ascent, a website focused on financial services, using data from the Washington-based think tank Economic Policy Institute.

Among those people who had suffered some sort of economic setback resulting from the pandemic, 7.4 million were, at some point, officially unemployed, while 2.9 million were unemployed in practice but were misclassified as employed or not in the labour force, said the article.

In April, 2020, the unemployment rate in the US reached its highest level on record, it added.