This is a real and serious problem and I wish people would take it more seriously. The actual solution is addressing the barriers to work created by Covid.
I actively promoted the local Little Caesar's. At one point, they had so little business they were afraid they would go out of business, but they are unusually well-positioned to move to less risk of infection because they already had a pizza portal, it just wasn't being used by anyone.
I made sure to start using it and to promote to other people and to promote online ordering and ordering by phone. They soon were wicked busy and all orders had wait times and they began hiring new people.
I'm not against stimulus checks, but that's crisis management. It's not a real solution.
A real solution is solving the problems in the way work is structured that is keeping so many people from pursuing an earned income right now. And we aren't taking that seriously enough.
If you are in any position whatsoever to work on that, please do. I do what little I can with a small reddit called r/GigWorks, though I don't know that I'm accomplishing anything at all.
To try to limit the degree to which people get depressed over this: Keep in mind that we don't have hard numbers for comparing this with confidence to a scenario where people just kept working and more people died as a consequence or ended up permanently maimed by Covid.
Humans are terrible at counting the disasters that should have happened but didn't. High unemployment was the short-term cost for trying to lower the death toll.
Please take high unemployment seriously as a real problem and work on finding ways to employ people safely via remote work, contactless delivery methods, etc. The cure for this is getting people back to work. The way to do that while the pandemic is still ongoing is to take germ control seriously as a real need in every single job.