These states suffer the worst unemployment as coronavirus pandemic recovery lags

The number of jobs lost due to the coronavirus shutdown continue to mount, with the latest weekly total of Americans applying for unemployment benefits coming in at 898,000. Yahoo Finance's Emily McCormick and Zack Guzman break down the details.

Video Transcript

ZACK GUZMAN: I want to kick things off with the update on unemployment claims we got this morning, unexpectedly rising last week to the highest number that we've seen since August. On an unadjusted basis it was the highest we've seen since July. So here to breakdown that report in more detail for us is Yahoo Finance's Emily McCormick. And I want to get to you right now with the details. Emily?

EMILY MCCORMICK: Absolutely, Zack. So taking a look at the state unemployment claims, we saw those coming in at 898,000 last week. That was the number of initial jobless claims we had for that week ended October 10th, higher than expected. Consensus economists had been looking for 825,000 new claims, and the previous week was upwardly revised slightly to 845,000 claims. So again, an unexpected increase on a week-over-week basis we got for that headline.

Now taking a look at the continuing jobless claims for the week ended October 3, those are reported on a one-week lag. And we did see those improve more than expected to just over 10 million. Consensus economists had been looking for 10 and 1/2 million. And this was also, again, an improvement from the more than 11.1 million we saw during that previous week.

Now taking a look at these headline new jobless claims, I do want to highlight that these increased even in absence of new claims reports out of California. Remember that that state, which is the most populous in the country, had announced a two-week pause in actually processing new claims in order to work through its backlog and implement some fraud-prevention technology. So we still haven't gotten an update out of California, and that state had previously been one of the biggest contributors to new claims week over week. So something to watch in the weeks to come.

Now taking a look at the data that we do have, we did see large increases out of Indiana. That state reporting a rise of nearly 19,000 new claims last week to about 29,000 in total. We also saw large increases reported for Georgia, Washington state, and Wisconsin.

Now I also want to highlight in another sign of the ongoing strain for the labor market, we had unadjusted claims for the Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation program rising by more than 818,000 to nearly 2.8 million for the week ended September 26th. Now that's a huge surge in the number of individuals who have exhausted regular state unemployment benefits and have had to move onto that federal program which provides another 13 weeks worth of benefits. So another sign here, Zack, as we've seen, also in the Department of Labor's monthly jobs report in the number of individuals on temporary layoff moving into more permanent territory, Zack.