Last week increased to 778,000 new applications
The situation on the US labor market has deteriorated again amid the escalating corona pandemic. In the week up to November 21, there were 778,000 new applications for unemployment benefits, as the Ministry of Labor announced on Wednesday. Analysts had expected an average of 730,000 applications. In the week before, there were 748,000 new applications, at the beginning of November the number was around 700,000.
The data provide a real-time impression of the situation on the labor market in the world's largest economy. Immediately before the corona pandemic, the number of new applications was mostly around 200,000 per week. The unemployment rate fell to 6.9 percent in October. Before the worsening pandemic in March, the unemployment rate was a low 3.5 percent.
According to the Ministry of Labor, around 20.5 million people received some form of unemployment benefit in the week ending November 7th. A year earlier it was only 1.5 million people in the same week.
The coronavirus pandemic remains out of control in the United States. Most recently there were an average of almost 170,000 new infections every day. Since the beginning of the pandemic, around 12.6 million of the 330 million Americans have been infected with the SARS-CoV-2 pathogen. The death toll after infection is around 260,000.
