When SA went into hard lockdown and the economy came to a near standstill in the second quarter of last year, 2.2-million jobs were lost. And though the economy and employment have begun to recover, many of those jobs have not come back — almost 1.4-million fewer people are employed now than before the Covid crisis.

That’s the bottom line of the latest quarterly labour force survey numbers from StatsSA. They are the first official figures that enable us to compare this year’s first quarter with last year's pre-lockdown first quarter...