One of the truisms of recessions is that young workers are feeling the effects first and also in the greatest numbers. But the current collapse of jobs for young workers has been even more pronounced than usual because the very industries most affected by shutdown due to Covid-19 are those that employ more younger workers.

This week has come more economic data highlighting the impact of the coronavirus on jobs. And once again the news is not good.

In the middle week of April, the number of jobs fell 1.5%. That in itself is not a terrible result relative to what we saw earlier in the month, but it still adds up to a 7.5% fall in jobs in the past month:

You can’t exactly marry up these figures with the standard monthly labour force figures (there are differences of measurement), but a 7.5% fall in employment would mean around 975,000 fewer people working in April compared to March.

It’s a figure so large it is hard to grasp.

And as always with unemployment, the losses are not evenly spread.

In every economic downturn, younger workers suffer the worst and the job losses recede until you get to workers close to retirement, whereupon the numbers rise again:

Younger workers inevitably have less attachment to any job than older workers, they are usually less skilled and are therefore easier to replace when things pick up again.

But while previous recessions have seen massive falls in the number of youth employed, nothing compares to what we are seeing now:

If the employment numbers flow through at the same level as these latest job figures do, it will mean there is now a lower percentage of teenagers with a job than has ever been recorded.

The GFC saw a massive shift in our working life – the plunge in teenagers employed continued to fall as many departed the labour force and stayed in school. Since the middle of 2017 there had been an increase in youth employed, mostly due to an increase in those no longer in school getting a job.

But that 18 months increase and more has been lost in four weeks.

The loss has also been much larger for female teenagers – a 21.5% fall compared to a 13.3% drop for males.

The reason why youth and women in general have suffered larger losses of work is because of the industries that have been hammered by closures.

If we are to find any sliver of good news in these latest figures it is that in the middle of April, for the first time in six weeks, the number of jobs in the accommodation and food services industry did not fall.

The bad news is that this is the case because there was hardly anyone left to lose their job.

There are now 33% fewer jobs in that sector than there was a month ago.

The arts and recreation sector, which continues to lose jobs at a stunning rate, has a workforce that is 27% smaller than it was in March, while the “other services” sector, which includes health and beauty service workers, fell 12%.

And the thing about those three industries is they all feature much higher levels of young workers than others. A quarter of those working in the accommodation and food services sector are teenagers, as are 1 in 10 of workers in the arts and recreation sector.

The only high employer of youth not in the top six of industries to lose jobs was the retail sector. But even here, while there have not been losses in supermarkets and food retailing, the latest retail sales figures show massive falls among other sectors such as clothing and department stores.

And while it is clear that young workers have taken the economic hit on the chin, let us not pretend things are fine for others.

Nearly 12% of people in their 20s have lost work in the past month – with the number of men in their 20s in work now lower than ever recorded, and the level of women with a job back to that of the early 1990s:

While the situation is less dire for those in their 30s and 40s, who are more likely to be starting or raising a family and hoping to buy their first home, it is still terrible. There are fewer people employed of both age groups now than has been the case for around 15 years:

The impact of the coronavirus on jobs is now here for all to see and experience. Nearly a million Australians at once are suddenly without a job, and so great has been the change and the time it takes to recover such job losses, it will be marked as a moment when the make-up of our labour force changed forever.

• Greg Jericho writes on economics for Guardian Australia