How Pa. is faring
Data used to create WalletHub’s rankings came from the U.S. Department of Labor. Based on that data, the study found that Pennsylvania’s unemployment claims increased by:
• 188.46% from June 2019 to June 2020
• 83.49% from January to June of this year
• 1,404.57% since the start of the pandemic. This metric refers to the increase in the number of unemployment insurance initial claims between the weeks of March 16, 2020 to June 1, 2020 compared to the weeks of March 18, 2019 to June 3, 2019.
That last metric, in particular, gives a sense of how steeply the number of unemployment cases has risen since the outbreak and subsequent shutdown orders began to hit the economy just three months ago.
By comparison, the five states most hard-hit since the beginning of the pandemic were: Georgia (4,438% increase in claims), New Hampshire (3,763%), Florida (3,618%), Kentucky (3,586%), Virginia (2,901%) and North Carolina (2,901%).
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