The personal finance website WalletHub declared Thursday that “Virginia is struggling with its unemployment recovery with last week’s claims higher than key dates in 2020.”
According to WalletHub’s updated rankings for the states whose unemployment claims are recovering the quickest, released Thursday, Virginia ranks 49th among the 50 states and the District of Columbia in terms of its rate of recovery from unemployment claims. Virginia was one of only four states (New Mexico, Maryland, and Oregon were the other three.)that had unemployment claims last week that were worse than the same week last year.
Three of the statistics the website cited to account for Virginia’s poor showing were that weekly unemployment claims in the commonwealth increased by 518.16% compared to the same week in 2019, the second biggest increase in the country; weekly unemployment claims in Virginia increased by 298.27% compared to the start of 2020, the third biggest increase in the U.S.; and weekly unemployment claims in Virginia increased by 11.03% compared to the same week last year, the fifth biggest increase in the U.S.
According to WalletHub’s rankings, the ten states that are enjoying the quickest recovery from unemployment claims are (1) North Dakota (2) Kentucky (3) South Carolina (4) Arkansas (5) New York (6) Arizona (7) Iowa (8) Pennsylvania (9) South Dakota and (10) Vermont).
The ten places in the country experiencing the slowest recovery from unemployment claims, according to WalletHub’s rankings are (42) Tennessee (43) Alaska (44) Colorado (45) Oregon (46) Indiana (47) Illinois (48) Maryland (49) Virginia (50) District of Columbia and (51) New Mexico.