Another week of the COVID-19 crisis, another 6.6 MILLION (!) Americans filing for unemployment, on top of the previous week’s 6.9 MILLION. Here in Virginia, we had another 149,758 unemployment claims through April 4, on top of the 112,497 claims for the previous week. As the Washington Post reports, “Economists say the U.S. unemployment rate is now 13 percent, the worst since the Great Depression.” Is there any end in sight to this?
P.S. To put Virginia’s unemployment claims in perspective, the labor force is about 4.4 million and total unemployed were 119k in September. Now. we’ve added over 260k to that in just the past two weeks, implying an unemployment rate now around 9%.
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