These 3 states have the worst unemployment rates

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 860,000. Yahoo Finance's Zack Guzman breaks down the details.

Video Transcript

ZACK GUZMAN: --want to highlight the update we got on the unemployment front from the Department of Labor today. Initial jobless claims coming in for the latest week here at 860,000 versus the 850,000 economists were expecting. That was down from 884,000 during the prior week. A one-week lag there on continuing claims also showed a number that was better than expected here at 12.628 million versus the 13 million continuing claims expected. That was also down from the prior week.

Outside of those, though, also worth highlighting the jobless claims beyond just those state programs here, when you look at the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program. That's reserved for those not usually covered in the regular state programs we're discussing there, including the self-employed and gig workers. That also decreased for the first time in five weeks to about 659,000 from 868,000, according to the unadjusted figures.

But overall, when you step back and look at these numbers, again, we always stress, we try and put it in the historical context here of not seeing more than 700,000 back in any week during the Great Recession. So those are kind of the numbers we're looking at approaching that now, improving--

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ZACK GUZMAN: [INAUDIBLE] on a weekly count underneath 1 million here. Also, as we like to highlight here on a state-by-state comparison look, as we've highlighted here, when you break out the insured unemployment rate-- that would be the definition of the ratio here-- on citizens claiming unemployment benefits versus the overall ratio of that working force here, when you look at that statistic, we are still seeing Hawaii lead the nation in terms of the uninsured-- the insured unemployment rate there at 20.3%.

That's higher than all of the states or territories that we're seeing here in the US, followed by California at about 17.3%. And Nevada still hard hit when we think about the gaming sector there in that state, seeing an insured unemployment rate north of 15% nationally. We're coming in above 9%, just to put those states in comparison. But as we do, we like to highlight those.