Wisconsin new unemployment filings top 69,000, a decrease from last week

Virus Outbreak Unemployment — Visitors to the Department of Labor are turned away at the door by personnel due to closures over coronavirus concerns, Wednesday, March 18, 2020, in New York. Applications for jobless benefits are surging in some states as coronavirus concerns shake the U.S. economy. The sharp increase comes as governments have ordered millions of workers, students and shoppers to stay home as a precaution against spreading the virus that causes the COVID-19 disease.
John Minchillo / AP

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(The Center Square) – Unemployment claims in Wisconsin are much higher than historical numbers as the fallout continues from efforts to control the coronavirus outbreak.

The U.S. Department of Labor released numbers Thursday morning detailing unemployment for each state for the week ending April 11. Wisconsin residents filed 69,884 initial claims that week, down 34,939 from the previous week’s 104,823 claims.

The numbers are daunting at the national level as well, with another 5.2 million people filing for unemployment. More than 6 million people filed across the country in each of the previous two weeks.

"The advance seasonally adjusted insured unemployment rate was 8.2 percent for the week ending April 4, an increase of 3.1 percentage points from the previous week's unrevised rate," the release from the Department of Labor stated. "This marks the highest level of the seasonally adjusted insured unemployment rate in the history of the seasonally adjusted series. The previous high was 7.0 percent in May of 1975."

California led all states with 660,966 claims for the April 5-11 period. The biggest increase was seen in Colorado, with a 127 percent spike.

The latest data arrives in the midst of an ongoing conversation about reopening the national economy, which was in the midst of a long period of expansion stretching back to the end of the 2009 recession before the pandemic forced the closures of most businesses.

President Donald Trump on Wednesday promised that a national reopening plan would be forthcoming Thursday, and a number of states have also started putting together plans. That latter group includes a pair of coalitions, one consisting of the three West Coast states and another including seven Northeast states, including New York, aiming to coordinate the reopening in their regions.

Meanwhile, the coronavirus outbreak continues to spread infections and claim lives, although not at the level that many projections had predicted. So far, there have been 641,726 diagnosed cases of coronavirus in the U.S. and 28,390 deaths from COVID-19, the respiratory disease sometimes caused by the virus. In Wisconsin, there have been 3,555 diagnosed cases and 170 deaths.