Drew Dixon
The stream of Floridians seeking help due to coronavirus-related joblessness ticked up slightly in the past week, according to figures released by the Florida Department of Economic Opportunity.
There are now 4.068 million total claims for unemployment benefit claims filed in the Sunshine State since the outbreak of COVID-19 in March. That’s a jump by about 66,000 compared to the previous week. In other words, an increase of about 6,000 new filings over the previous week.
Florida has broken the 2 million threshold for total claims paid to people seeking unemployment assistance due to the coronavirus outbreak. The state reports that 97.2% of those claims filed have been paid in Florida. A total of about 2.01 million claims in the Sunshine State have now been paid.
While the number of jobless claims due to the pandemic increased a bit over the past week, that figure is still significantly down from the peak of the outbreak. Some weeks saw new pandemic-related unemployment claims climb to has high at 500,000 in one week. Those figures started to shift downward and fall below 100,000 on a weekly basis for most of August and then fell to 70,000 or below in September.
There was a total of 3.91 million unique unemployment claims related to the pandemic as of the past week, meaning they were not duplicate filings. About 3.86 million total claims have been processed in Florida, which is about 99.3%.
There are now 2.18 million Floridians eligible for state reemployment assistance, federal pandemic emergency unemployment compensation and federal pandemic unemployment assistance. Another 678,982 people in the state are not eligible for state or federal reemployment assistance.
The price tag for all the state and federal payouts in Florida due to unemployment created by the pandemic has now racked up $16.729 billion. About $11.629 billion of that funding has come from federal pandemic unemployment compensation and lost wage assistance. Another 1.024 billion has been paid by federal pandemic emergency unemployment compensation funds while $759.94 million has been covered by federal pandemic unemployment assistance.
Florida’s reemployment assistance program has paid for about $3.314 billion of the funding since the outbreak gripped the state beginning in March. That figure is up by about $64 million from the previous week.
