- The number of US
jobless claims last week totaled 3.2 million, the Labor Department said Thursday. The median economist estimate was for 3 million claims. - That raises the seven-week total to more than 33 million.
- It's the fifth week in a row that claims have declined, signaling the worst shock of the coronavirus pandemic to the labor market may be in the past.
- Still, the fact claims have stayed in the millions for weeks shows persistent economic fallout from the coronavirus pandemic.
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The number of Americans that have filed for
US jobless claims totaled 3.2 million last week, the Labor Department said Thursday. The median economist estimate was for 3 million claims for the seven days that ended Saturday. The figure raises the seven-week total to more than 33 million.
Still, it's the fifth week in a row that new
"It's very clear the labor market is still taking it on the chin from the coronavirus," Ryan Sweet, a senior economist at Moody's Analytics told Business Insider.
Read more: These 22 well-known companies could get acquired as coronavirus batters their businesses, BTIG says
A slow road down
While jobless claims are moving in the right direction, it's likely that the weekly report will show elevated numbers for some time.
"We could get down to maybe between one and two million by the end of May, which is still elevated by historical standards," Lindsey Piegza, chief economist at Stifel, told Business Insider. "But it is much improved from those peak levels that we saw initially."
Economists expect claims to trend down but remain historically high for a few reasons. One is that it's likely some states are still working through backlogs of claims that overwhelmed unemployment office systems never meant to handle millions of applications per week.
In addition, even though some states have begun to open parts of their economies shut down to contain Covid-19— which should help the labor market — these reopenings will be slow, according to Piegza. That could delay a rush back to the workforce for people who have been laid off amid the pandemic.
"It's not going to be a flip the switch scenario," Piegza said, adding that it will take awhile for businesses to be up and running, and for consumers to be ready to be back out shopping and going to movies and restaurants.
"I do think it's going to be a very slow, tepid recovery, which is going to continue to reflect in very dismal labor market numbers," she said.
What's coming next
The weekly jobless claims number comes one day before the April jobs report, set to be released by the Labor Department Friday. Following weeks of millions of jobless claims, economists expect the April jobs report to show a devastating picture of the US labor market reeling from the coronavirus crisis.
Estimates are for millions of jobs lost in April and a leap in the
The dismal projection was supported by a Wednesday report from the
On Tuesday, President Donald Trump said that the US economy should soon reopen even if it means that the Covid-19 death toll rises. So far, more than 70,000 Americans have died from the coronavirus, and there are more than 1.2 million confirmed cases in the US.
Even if the