Coronavirus job losses hit these states the hardest

Yahoo Finance’s Heidi Chung joins Zack Guzman to discuss which states are being hit the hardest economically from the coronavirus, as weekly jobless claims jump another 6.6 million.

Video Transcript

ZACK GUZMAN: Just today, again, we got unemployment claims surpassing even the already bleak expectations that were out there. Economists were expecting yet another tough week. We want to get to Heidi Chung with the details on that. Heidi, it looks like more pain and more jobs lost.

HEIDI CHUNG: Yeah, Zack. The COVID-19 pandemic continues to hammer the US economy, specifically the Labor Department, as we learned earlier this morning. Fresh data from the Labor Department showed the third consecutive week of jobless claims in the millions. The number of Americans filing for unemployment benefits surged another 6.6 million for the week ended April 4, and consensus expectations for that week were for 5 and 1/2 million claims.

The prior week's record-breaking figure was actually revised higher to 6.9 million from 6.6 million. So over the past three weeks, more than 16 million unemployment insurance claims have been filed, and continuing claims represents Americans currently receiving unemployment benefits. That number jumped by 4.4 million to a record 7.46 million in the week ended March 28.

So looking at the states that reported the highest number of claims last week, topping the list California, again, seeing the highest number of initial claims at an estimated 925,000 on an unadjusted basis. Coming in second, we had Georgia with an estimated total of 388,000, Michigan with 385,000, and New York reporting 3-- [AUDIO OUT]

Specifically, people in Florida and Texas are having a really hard time filing claims. Of course, those two states are the most populous here in the US. I also do want to bring to your attention that it's not a very perfect indicator, but Google searches are very, very high still for the phrase unemployment benefits. It peaked, actually, on March 30 and has since come down from those highs, but it's still at a very, very elevated level. So if that is to believed, we still have more pain ahead for the labor-- the labor market, Zack.

ZACK GUZMAN: Yeah, and that's true. I mean, I was looking back-- you can look at the numbers week over week, we've been tracking that-- but if you look back to the percent change we got this week versus before all of the lockdowns really started to take effect in the last week ending March 14, you look at these percentage jumps for some of these states, Michigan the largest over that time span, up more than 7000%, which is just insane to try and comprehend here. Georgia, as you mentioned, Heidi, still showing up on that time period as well, Alabama, New Hampshire, Virginia.

Interesting to note, though, that we did see-- you would expect California and New York to be the top two when we about populous states in total number of claims, but interesting to see Pennsylvania surpassing New York in total jobless claims, which is something that you might not expect, as well, but just kind of goes to show the way that these economies can be levered to jobs that might not be able to just work from home as we continue to track which states are hardest hit.