One observation that didn’t make it into my Friday story on the bad-and-getting-worse employment picture is that job losses due to the coronavirus crisis are going to hit industries you don’t expect. For example, health care: You might think that’s a sector that won’t be hit by this crisis, as the coronavirus is generating all sorts of demand for health-care services, but like virtually every sector, it’s going to have parts where workers are laid off even while other parts desperately try to get as much staffing as they can.

You saw this even in the extremely partial information in Friday’s jobs report, which reflected the employment situation as of the week ending Saturday, March 14, well before the worst of the closures had hit. That report showed 43,000 fewer health-care jobs in mid-March than in mid-February. Hospital employment was almost precisely flat between the two months, but dental offices reported 17,000 fewer workers and doctors’ offices had 12,000 fewer. Since about three times as many Americans work in doctors’ offices as in dentists’ offices, that’s an especially hard hit to dental employment, which makes sense: Most dental services are not emergencies, and dental work creates significant risk of exposure to coronavirus, so many dental offices have closed, including mine, which canceled my semi-annual appointment that had been scheduled for March 18.

Read more at NY Mag.