The number of jobs lost due to the closure of the coronavirus continues to rise, with the latest weekly total of Americans applying for unemployment benefits reaching more than 1.4 million once again.
The latest series of applications brings the total number of jobless claims to nearly 50 million in the past 15 weeks, eliminating the 20 million jobs added in the past decade by a margin of more than two to one.
While some states have seen jobless claims drop from record levels after the coronavirus pandemic shook the US job landscape, some have stubbornly suffered high job losses months after the recovery. A review by Yahoo Finance of US Department of Labor unemployment claim data shows that Oklahoma, Alaska, Georgia, Mississippi and Florida have seen the weakest signs of a return to normality and a bottom in loss. of jobs.
Comparing each state’s average weekly jobless claims totals for the past seven weeks to the seven weeks beginning March 14, which brought in a record number of jobless claims, reveals that those states are stopping bleeding much more. slowly than others. Contrasting those first seven weeks of pain with the last seven-week period shows that the five weakest states have only seen average weekly initial jobless claims drop by less than 50%. On the opposite side of the spectrum, Rhode Island has seen weekly initial jobless claims drop by 85% over the same period.
Other states enjoying some pretty drastic declines in weekly initial jobless claims since the pandemic began include Michigan, Vermont, and New Jersey, which showed an 80% drop in claims. To be sure, even states showing declining initial jobless claims still have a long way to go to return to pre-pandemic levels. Rhode Island, for example, is still receiving three times as many weekly jobless claims as it did before the pandemic, despite being the state with the largest average weekly drop.
Interestingly, the states that show the most muffled recoveries also coincide mainly with those that suffer recent and notable spikes in coronavirus cases. In the south, Mississippi, Florida and Georgia have seen an increase in the number of cases with confirmed cases increasing more than 50% in the last two weeks of June. That observation would seem to support what Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell emphasized in his opening testimony before the House Financial Services Committee this week.
“The way forward for the economy remains extremely uncertain and will largely depend on our success in containing the virus,” he said Tuesday. “A full recovery is unlikely to occur until people are sure it is safe to participate in a wide range of activities.”
(Yahoo Finance / David Foster)
