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Duff said she began attempting to file for unemployment on Monday and found the overwhelmed system exasperating.

\"I talked to a robot for a good 30 minutes answering questions. He had the slowest voice ever,\" she told ABC News. \"I got excited because I heard him say he was going to put me through to a claim specialist, and then I heard him say that everybody was busy and to call again another day. I was like, 'Wow, this is very frustrating.' Their system was not prepared for this. Our government was not prepared for this. It's a lot.\"

Julie Verratti, co-owner of Denizens Brewing Co. in Silver Springs, Maryland, said she had the \"heartbreaking task\" of putting 30 of her 45 employees on furlough this week.

\"I'm infuriated that the unemployment is only going to be 80% of what they make. It should be 100%, quite frankly,\" Verratti told ABC News \"It's just atrocious what people are going through right now. I don't think the state governments are ready to handle the impact of people coming to them right now. This is going to be an onslaught.\"

Verratti ticked off a list of things she believes the federal and state governments should get moving on, including immediately instituting a moratorium on all commercial debts, commercial mortgages and commercial rents.

\"What that will do is it will retain cash in small businesses' hands so they're able to pay their employees longer,\" Verratti said. \"You've got businesses across the entire country right now looking at having to pay rent on the first, to pay their bank note on the first. This is less than two weeks from now, and they're also thinking, ‘How do I pay my employees when revenue has just been completely cut off?'\"

\"I know that the government is talking about sending checks to people, which is great,\" she continued. \"They also need to make sure that they are retaining cash for people that they already have. We are starring down the barrel of a recession like we've never seen before, and I would even argue that it might be worse than the Great Depression, and I'm not being hyperbolic when I'm speaking right now.\"

Dworkin, of the National Housing Conference, a non-profit that has been developing solutions for affordable housing since 1931, applauded the move by HUD to temporarily suspend all home foreclosures and evictions, and called on the Trump administration to institute a streamlined housing voucher program to support renters who lost their jobs amid the pandemic.

\"We need to immediately streamline and reform the housing voucher program so it can provide support to all those who are impacted by this crisis, and allow landlords to take the vouchers without bureaucratic red tape or regulatory risk for as long as the national interest requires,\" Dworkin said. \"Vouchers should be available online and available to renters who lost their jobs as a result of the outbreak of COVID-19.\"

He said the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation, also known as Freddie Mac, and the Federal National Mortgage Association, commonly known as Fannie Mae, are encouraging homeowners to contact their mortgage service providers immediately if they're in financial straits.

\"For homeowners, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have already made clear that all you have to do is call your servicer, the phone number that you send your payment to every month, and tell them that because of coronavirus you are unable to pay your mortgage,\" Dworkin told ABC News. \"It may be because you lost your job, it maybe because you're sick. It doesn't matter. They're not asking for proof. They're just saying if you can't pay your mortgage because of COVID-19 let us know, and we will defer your mortgage payments for as long as six months.\"

He said the actions displayed so far by federal and state governments, and the financial institutions, are a testament to lessons learned from the previous economic meltdown.

\"During the 2008 crisis, we really failed to help the homeowners who were in trouble through no fault of their own. They didn't get bad mortgages, they had bad timing and bad luck, and when they lost their jobs they had run out of equity because housing values were going down,\" Dworkin said. \"About 10 million people lost their homes, and we could have saved 5 million of them if we had been more proactive like they were in the Great Depression.\"

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