Job growth in the United States saw its weakest monthly numbers since December 2020 — at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The revelation Friday left CNN’s Matt Egan stunned at what he called “pretty striking numbers.”

“The job market is slowing down, it’s losing steam a lot more than we realized,” Egan said. “So yes, 73,000, that’s how many jobs were added in July, but it’s significantly below the 115,000 that was expected. The unemployment rate went up – that was expected – from 4.1% to 4.2%, but we saw very significant downward revisions to the prior month.”

The newly revised June numbers left both Egan and anchor John Berman shocked. July’s downturn “only tells part of the story,” Berman said.

Courtesy of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the new data shows that job numbers in the previous month — June — had to be revised from originalyl projected job growth of 147,000 new jobs to a staggeringly low 14,000, which Egan noted was “the weakest month of job growth since December of 2020 during COVID.”

Furthermore, the new data showed that in July, 11,000 manufacturing jobs were lost, a data point that runs counter to President Donald Trump’s stated goal with his tariff strategy of reshoring the manufacturing industry.

“That’s pretty striking when you think about it because why do we have historically high tariffs?” Egan said. “They’re trying to boost the U.S. manufacturing industry, but what we’re seeing is manufacturing actually losing jobs.”

With inflation upticking slightly, manufacturing jobs shrinking and job growth slowing down, Egan said that on every metric, the economy is performing “worse than expected.”

“We saw that core GDP really showed that the U.S. economy really slowed down during the second quarter,” he said.

“Yesterday’s inflation report, that heated up – it was a four-month high – we’re seeing that the prices for goods have gone up, possibly because of tariffs. You put all of this together and I do think that all of these developments are just going to increase concerns about the U.S. economy.

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