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Last week another 680,000 people applied for UI. This included 547,000 who applied for regular state UI (seasonally adjusted) and 133,000 who applied for Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA). 1/ https://www.dol.gov/ui/data.pdf
Claims are extremely high, but slowly moving in the right direction. The 680,000 who applied for UI last week was a decrease of 37,000 from the prior week. The 4-week moving average of total initial claims decreased by 55,000. 2/
Last week was the 57th straight week total initial claims were higher than the 10th-worst week of the Great Recession (GR). (If you restrict to regular state claims—because we didn’t have PUA in the GR—initial claims are still nearly 3 times where they were before COVID.) 3/
This chart shows continuing claims in all programs over time (the latest data for this are for April 3). Continuing claims are still more than 15 million above where they were before the virus hit. 4/
