There is a very substantial amount for Americans currently filing for unemployment amidst the global coronavirus pandemic since last week, as most of the business establishments shut down to curb the spread of the disease.
As of March 21, the number of unemployed cases rose to 3.28 million, according to the department of labor.
This proves to be so far the highest number of jobless claims in the history of the country, since the recording of the data that was in 1967.
According to Glassdoor economist, Daniel Zhao, “Most historical comparisons of this scale are inadequate. The closest would be natural disasters like major hurricanes. However, as today’s report shows, the coronavirus outbreak is economically akin to a major hurricane occurring in every state around the country for weeks on end.”
Before this coronavirus pandemic started, jobless claims were averaging about 200,000 each week. At this moment, it is 282,000 claims. Since the start of the outbreak, some of the business has shut down already, and others have laid off their workers temporarily.
The problem with this pandemic as to economic distress is that this coronavirus outbreak is so sudden and left every industry and business in distressed.
Many economists are expecting that millions will be unemployed in the coming weeks. According to a forever chief economist from the Department of Labor, Heidi Shierholz, “We estimate that by summer, 14 million workers will lose their jobs due to the coronavirus shock.”
The Labor department all over the US is now struggling for the influx of claims for unemployment benefits.
The department in New York needed to hire 65 more additional staff for handling all the claims which start to come. Florida will also hire 100 more employees to go through the application process.
The Great Recession in 2019 had its peak number of 665,000, and the highest so far was 695,999 in 1982.
Last week was higher than expected.
According to Tom Gimbel, “We’ve known this number was coming for a week and a half. It doesn’t surprise me at all. When you see a city like Las Vegas get shut down, I don’t know what other options there were, then seeing a number like this.”
Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell said, “This is a unique situation. People need to understand, and this is not a typical downturn. At a certain point, we will get the spread of the virus under control. At that time, confidence will return; businesses will open again; people will come back to work. So, you may well see a significant rise in unemployment, a significant decline in economic activity. But there can also be a good rebound on the other side of that.”
These numbers could cause a lot of backlog of the unemployment applications.
Others would still need their initial claims from the past weeks.
Policies may differ from state to state, but self-employed people, independent contractors, and freelancers are not eligible for unemployment benefits.
Part-time workers also cannot apply for unemployment benefits.
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