Cartoon by Dave Granlund

How long will it take the US economy to recover from coronavirus?

Al Jazeera: Coronavirus lockdowns are pushing the United States into a sharp and painful recession. But how long will it take for the economy to recover its pre-pandemic strength? And what does it mean for the more than 36 million Americans who have lost their jobs since mid-March?

How deep of a hole has the economy fallen into?

A really deep one. The Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta's GDPNow forecasting model currently sees the US economy shrinking 42.8 percent from April through June. That's -42.8 percent.

As for the jobs market - Federal Reserve chief Jerome Powell said during an interview with CBS on Sunday that the US unemployment rate could peak at 25 percent.  In April, the unemployment rate hit 14.7 percent - the highest since the Great Depression. And consider this: in February, before lockdowns started sweeping the nation, the jobless rate was a mere 3.5 percent.

That sounds more like an abyss. What's it going to take to crawl out of it?

To get an idea of what it will take, you have to first understand exactly what lockdowns have done to the economy. To illustrate, we'll start with Netflix.

But I don't subscribe to Netflix. I watch Hulu.

Hulu, Netflix, Amazon Prime - any streaming service will do for this analogy.

Fine, then. Go ahead.

OK. So, you know when you're binge-watching a programme and you start to feel hungry. So you hit pause, go to the kitchen, make some popcorn and then come back and pick up the programme where you left off?

I do that all the time. Is that what happened to the economy?

No. Hitting pause is what a business does when it closes for, let's say, the weekend. It pauses activity and picks up Monday right where it left off. But that's not what happened with coronavirus lockdowns.

When cities and states across the US - and countries all over the world, for that matter - started closing borders, ordering businesses to shut and people to stay at home, it was more like closing the Netflix app, turning off your computer and unplugging your wireless router.

That sounds drastic.

It was. That's why economists keep saying that the pandemic has delivered an unprecedented blow to the US and global economies.