WASHINGTON (AP) — A grim snapshot of the U.S. job market's sudden collapse emerged Friday with a report that employers shed hundreds of thousands of jobs last month because of the viral outbreak that's brought the economy to a near-standstill.

The loss of 701,000 jobs, reported by the Labor Department, ended nearly a decade of uninterrupted job growth, the longest such streak on record. The unemployment rate surged in March from a 50-year low of 3.5% to 4.4% — the sharpest one-month jump in the jobless rate since 1975.

And that's just a hint of what's to come.

For the April jobs report that wi...