Nearly 43 million Americans have filed for unemployment benefits during the pandemic

Millions of Americans again filed for unemployment benefits last week, as the coronavirus recession drags on.

Another 1.9 million workers filed for initial unemployment aid last week, according to the US Department of Labor. More than a quarter of the labor force — 42.6 million people — has now claimed benefits since the pandemic began ravaging the US labor market.

For 11 weeks in a row, jobless claims have been in the millions. Before the pandemic, the labor department had never recorded a single week of jobless claims over a million.

Stripping out seasonal adjustments, which usually help smooth out the data over time but add unnecessary noise during this unprecedented crisis, first-time claims stood at 1.6 million, a slight decrease from the prior week.

Initial claims have fallen in every report over the past 10 weeks, ever since first-time claims peaked at 6.9 million in the last week of March. Still, the last week’s claims were higher than economists had expected. That’s not a good sign for the recovery everyone is hoping for.

Continuing claims, which count people who have filed benefits for at least two weeks in a row, climbed to 21.5 million, an slight increase from the week prior. Economists had expected a decrease.

That’s disappointing sign. Economists began shifting their focus from initial claims to continuing claims in May, as the number of first-time filers continued to drop. The prior week’s report showed the first decline in continuing claims since the pandemic began, suggesting more people returned to work as the economy is reopening.

But last week’s data casts an ugly shadow over that theory. It once again proves that the road to recovery for America’s labor market will be painfully slow . And moving faster to reopen could increase the threat of spreading Covid-19.

Besides the filing for regular unemployment claims, more than 600,000 Americans filed for pandemic unemployment assistance last week. That’s half of last week’s 1.2 million PUA claimants.

Continued pandemic claims now stand are 10.4 million, up from 7.8 million in last week’s report.

America’s unemployment rate is expected to have reached nearly 20% in March, with 28.5 million jobs eliminated over the past two months. That’s an unemployment rate not recorded since the Great Depression, and the highest monthly level since the data collection began in 1948.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ monthly jobs report is due on Friday at 8:30 am ET.

This is a developing story. It will be updated