The wildest pandemic-era economic indicator has gotten boring. That's a good thing.

• The number of people filing for jobless benefits is hovering near pre-pandemic levels this year.
• Weekly counts are also fluctuating less as more workers take jobs and layoffs slow.

One of the wildest charts of the pandemic-era economy has gone stale.

After two years of historically high readings, the number of people seeking unemployment benefits because they lost their jobs has all but entirely retreated to pre-crisis lows.

This is a welcome sign for a labor market that, at the start of the pandemic, was completely turned on its head.

A return to normal after 2 years of volatility

Economists got their first look at the coronavirus' economic fallout on March 26, 2020. Weekly filings for unemployment insurance rocketed to a then-record 3.3 million as lockdown-related layoffs began to show up in government data. While most economic reports are published on a monthly basis, weekly filings for unemployment benefits offered a more timely look at just how quickly Americans were losing their jobs.

The following week saw claims more than double to nearly 6 million. The week after, which ended April 4, 2020, showed claims hitting an all-time high of 6.1 million. For reference, weekly counts hovered around 200,000 in the years before the pandemic.

Those days are over. Jobless claims totaled 215,000 last week, according to government data published Thursday, extending a months-long streak of claims coming in just above the pre-pandemic average.

Economic and markets indicators are often at their most interesting — and terrifying — when they're quickly changing. One common measure of this kind of volatility is the standard deviation, which measures, roughly speaking, how far a set of data points are from their average.

Claims were wildly oscillating throughout 2020, causing that volatility measure to spike early in the pandemic and stay elevated for a year. But now, the trailing 12-week standard deviation for initial claims has settled down a lot as the weekly figures have stopped wildly swinging up and down. That means the measure is boring again — which is a healthy sign for a more normal job market.

Continuing claims — which count Americans continuously receiving unemployment benefits — offer an even more encouraging signal. Filings stayed pretty stable at just under 1.5 million for the week that ended February 19, according to the Thursday report. That's well below the pre-crisis average of 1.7 million continuing claims.

Virus variants presented some headwinds in the summer and fall, but the hiring recovery has largely stayed intact. Job creation trounced forecasts in January despite the Omicron wave reaching its peak early that month. Positive revisions to November and December job gains further dispelled concerns that surging infections would derail the recovery.

A much faster recovery than that from the Great Recession

Broadly, the labor market is healing at three times the pace it did after the Great Recession. If average job creation holds strong from January's levels, it's possible the US recoups every job lost to the pandemic by July.

New data suggests the healthy pace continued through February. The US private sector added 475,000 payrolls last month, human-resources firm ADP said Wednesday. That exceeded the median forecast of 378,000 jobs but reflected a small deceleration from January's revised gain of 509,000 payrolls. Though ADP's reports have been somewhat decoupled from the government's own data, the February uptick hints at an encouraging print in the nonfarm payrolls report due for release on Friday.

Still, a complete labor market recovery doesn't guarantee a return to pre-crisis jobless claims figures. It's possible the government's pandemic-era boost to unemployment benefits increased Americans' awareness of their eligibility, Kathryn Anne Edwards, an economist at the RAND Corporation, told Insider in August. That could lead to permanently higher claims if a greater share of the jobless population taps their states' UI programs.

The labor market's recovery is far from complete. There are still roughly 3 million jobs to recover before the US returns to its pre-pandemic payroll count. And even then the US will have to make up for two years of regular job growth that would've happened without the pandemic.

Jobless claims, however, are looking much like they did before the era of lockdowns, masks, and daily infection updates. Some pockets of the economy are wonderfully boring again.