Drew Dixon
Florida jobless claims are back down again after a brief weekly spike.
About 90,000 more Floridians applied for coronavirus-related unemployment assistance in the past week, a decrease from the previous week, according to Florida Department of Economic Opportunity data.
There were a total of 3.81 million total unemployment claims filed since the COVID-19 outbreak as of this week, up from of 3.72 million last week. Last week’s total was up by about 100,000 over the previous week.
This week’s number of total jobless claims due to the pandemic brings the weekly increase back down to 90,000, which was the weekly number of additional filings for most of August, showing the number of jobless claims is starting to fall after some weeks saw as many as 500,000 new weekly claims made in Florida in the early stages of the outbreak.
In the past week, there were 3.65 million unique claims for pandemic unemployment relief, meaning they were not duplicates. Another 3.59 million claims have been processed since the outbreak in Florida, which is 98.5%.
There are about 2.08 million people in Florida who are now eligible for state reemployment assistance, federal pandemic emergency unemployment compensation or federal pandemic unemployment assistance. Of those, 666,551 are not eligible for federal or state jobless help.
There have been about 1.93 million total claims paid in Florida, which accounts for 93% of those claims.
In all, $14.61 billion has been paid to people who’ve made jobless claims in Florida. Of that, about $10.29 billion came from federal pandemic unemployment compensation. Another $599.12 million has come from federal pandemic unemployment assistance and $643.74 million has been paid out from federal pandemic emergency unemployment compensation.
Florida’s state reemployment assistance has paid out about $3.08 billion since the beginning of the crisis when furloughs, layoffs and business closures ensued after the pandemic began to grip the state in March. That’s about $78 million more than the previous week when that increase was about $100 million.
