According to the personal finance website WalletHub, Virginia is struggling to recover from new unemployment claims with last week’s claims higher than at the start of 2020. In fact, in the website’s updated rankings for the states (and the District of Columbia) whose unemployment claims are recovering the quickest, the commonwealth sat dead last in the No. 51 spot.
Contributing to that ranking, according to WalletHub, was the fact that weekly unemployment claims in Virginia increased by 354.32% compared to the same week in 2019, the biggest increase in the U.S.; weekly unemployment claims in Virginia increased by 239.46% compared to the start of 2020, also the biggest increase in the U.S.; and weekly unemployment claims in Virginia decreased by 18.42% compared to the same week last year, the fourth smallest decrease in the U.S.
The website noted that the U.S. is making significant progress in the fight against COVID-19 with the distribution of the vaccine, and this has been reflected in the job market as new unemployment claims decreased week-over-week on Aug 2. There are currently 8.7 million Americans unemployed due to the COVID-19 pandemic in total, though, and it’s important to look at some key stats for the latest week to get the full picture:
There were 375,000 new unemployment claims nationwide, which is a lot fewer than the 6.1 million during the peak of the pandemic (a 94% reduction).
The good news is that every state had unemployment claims last week that were better than the same week last year.
Seven states had unemployment claims last week that were lower than before the pandemic: Florida, South Carolina, Arizona, Pennsylvania, Kansas, Iowa, and Louisiana.
The ten states recovering the quickest from their unemployment claims, according to WalletHub’s rankings were (1) South Carolina (2) Florida (3) Kansas (4) Pennsylvania (5) Arizona (6) Washington (7) South Dakota (8) New Hampshire (9) New York (10) Vermont.
The ten places recovering the slowest from their unemployment claims, according to the website, were (42) Texas (43) Utah (44) Michigan (45) New Mexico (46) Illinois (47) Colorado (48) Indiana (49) District of Columbia (50) Rhode Island (51) Virginia.