Colorado, Mississippi, Minnesota, Montana and Tennessee will join other states beginning an experiment to reopen economies without the testing and contact-tracing infrastructure health experts say is needed to prevent a resurgence of infections, with lives in the balance.<\/p>\n

Georgia, Oklahoma, Alaska and South Carolina have already taken steps to restart their economies following a month of government-ordered lockdowns.<\/p>\n

Those unprecedented restrictions resulted in a record 26.5 million Americans filing for unemployment benefits since mid-March. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) predicted on Friday that the economy would contract at nearly a 40 percent annual rate in the second quarter.<\/p>\n

Even next year, the CBO forecast the unemployment rate averaging above 10 percent.<\/p>\n

White House economic adviser Kevin Hassett told reporters the US jobless rate would likely hit 16 percent or more in April.<\/p>\n

“I think the next couple of months are going to look terrible,” Hassett said on Sunday. “You’re going to see numbers as bad as anything we’ve ever seen before.”<\/p>\n

Against a backdrop of scattered protests across the country calling for stay-at-home orders to be lifted, US coronavirus cases topped 940,000 on Sunday after posting a record one-day increase on Friday.<\/p>\n

New York and other states have extended restrictions to mid-May. New York reported 367 new deaths on Sunday, its lowest increase since March 30. Democratic Governor Andrew Cuomo said construction and manufacturing would be the first businesses to reopen and could restart after May 15 in the upstate region with certain precautions and if cases continue to decline.<\/p>\n