The number of Americans applying for unemployment benefits topped 1 million for the twentieth straight week — bringing the total number of initial jobless claims filed during the coronavirus pandemic to more than 55 million.
An additional 1.186 million people filed for unemployment last week, according to the US Department of Labor. The unemployment rate is forecast to decrease slightly to 10.5 percent in July from 11.1 percent in June, according to Reuters.
Jobless claims were down 249,000 from the week prior, but at a total of 55.3 million, the number of Americans who have filed for unemployment claims during the course of the pandemic is greater than the populations of New York and Texas combined — and has long since surpassed the 37 million jobs lost over the 18 months during the Great Recession.
“I think it’s a positive sign that the numbers are going down,” unemployment insurance expert Andrew Stettner told The Post. “But it’s important to remember that we are in a very deep hole. Even though they improved a bit this week, we’re still extremely worried about the situation because the numbers are so high.”
Stettner added that the 1.2 million figure showed that the government stimulus program is working, but noted that the 89,331 increase in people receiving long-term unemployment is the highest it’s risen in any one week.
“Maybe fewer people are being laid off, but an increasing number of people are stuck without a job,” he said.
Mark Hamrick, senior economic analyst at Bankrate.com, said the economy is “a little bit like a boxer who just avoided another body blow,” but said that the idea 20 consecutive weeks of more than 7-digit claims was previously “unthinkable.”
“If you had told observers in February that you would see numbers like this over a prolonged period of time, they would’ve thought there would have been a catastrophe the likes of which we haven’t seen in our life time,” he said. “And in a way, there has.”
Continuing claims, which measure sustained joblessness on a one-week lag, was down to about 16 million in the week ending July 25, the US Department of Labor said.
The numbers arrive a week after the US economy suffered its worst blow since the Great Depression, with the Commerce Department reporting that the nation’s gross domestic product — the value of all goods and services produced here — shrunk 9.5 percent from the first quarter.
The plunge is unmatched in historical data from the National Bureau of Economic Research going back to 1875.
The most recent period that came anywhere close was a roughly 7.2 percent contraction in the last quarter of 1937, in the late stages of the Great Depression.