WASHINGTON - Nearly 17 million US workers lost their jobs or saw their wages decline in the course of the pandemic, a US report said on Thursday.

This is the figure as of October this year, said the article published by the Ascent, a website focused on financial services, using data from the Washington-based think tank Economic Policy Institute.

Among those people who had suffered some sort of economic setback resulting from the pandemic, 7.4 million were, at some point, officially unemployed, while 2.9 million were unemployed in practice but were misclassified as employed or not in the labor force, said the article.

In April, 2020, the unemployment rate in the United States reached its highest level on record, it added.