Unemployment in Brazil, Latin America's largest economy, remained at a record level in the three months from February, with 14.8 million of its 212 million people looking for work, official data showed Wednesday. Unemployment stood at 14.7 percent in the February-to-April period, the same as in the first quarter of the year, after three consecutive monthly increases fueled by a deadly new wave of the coronavirus epidemic, said the IBGE statistics body. Some two million people have not worked for more than a year. In the same three-month period last year, when Brazil recorded its first Covid-19 cases, joblessness was 12.6 percent. Brazil posted a record 4.1 percent yearly GDP contraction in 2020. In the first quarter of this year it reported stronger-than-expected growth of 1.2 percent, boosting hopes for a recovery and growth of about five percent in 2021, according to economists' predictions, though this depends on the outbreak and Brazil's vaccine rollout. js/jm/gm/mlr/bgs