INDIANAPOLIS — Unemployment claims continued to be filed in Indiana at an alarming pace, with at least 444,123 workers in the state losing their jobs over the past month due to the global COVID-19 pandemic.
Last week, 118,184 initial unemployment claims were filed in Indiana, slightly lower than the 127,010 claims filed the week before — but is still one of the highest totals of weekly unemployment claims filed in Indiana history, according to Indiana Department of Workforce Development data.
Updated county-level data was not released by press time on Thursday, but 3,840 claims were filed in Bartholomew County between the weeks ending March 21 and April 4.
To put that in perspective, that is roughly the equivalent of 7% of the estimated 51,204 people employed in Bartholomew County in September of last year, as measured by the most recent Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
An additional 5.2 million Americans applied for unemployment benefits last week, bringing the four-week total to about 22 million employees out of a work force of 159 million — easily the worst stretch of U.S. job losses on record, according to The Associated Press.
“We continue to experience extreme volumes of claim filings in Indiana just as we are around the country,” said Fred Payne, commissioner of the Indiana Department of Workforce Development.
During the first 15 days of April, the state made 432,740 unemployment insurance payments, compared to 71,000 during the entire month of April 2019, Payne said.
The Indiana Department of Workforce Development received 800,000 calls from April 1 to 14 and state officials have identified the cause of dropped calls and are addressing them, Payne said.
The latest round of staggering jobless claims came as many experts forecast that the pandemic may cause the worst economic downturn in the United States since the Great Depression of the 1930s.
On Tuesday, the International Monetary Fund said it expects the global economy to shrink 3% this year — far worse than its 0.1% dip in the Great Recession year of 2009 — before rebounding in 2021, according to wire reports.
The IMF projects an economic contraction this year of 5.9% in the United States.
“The world has been put in a great lockdown,” the IMF’s chief economist, Gita Gopinath, told reporters. “This is a crisis like no other.”
