Finally, on Tuesday, he managed to file his claim.
“So I now join the group who can shout out to the rest: ‘There’s hope!’” Mr. Sullivan wrote in an email.
Mr. Sullivan was one of more than 366,000 New Yorkers to file claims last week, up from 80,000 the week before, according to Thursday’s federal data. California, another state that has struggled with the deluge of filings, reported close to 900,000 claims last week, up from 186,000. Those figures, unlike the nationwide total, are not adjusted for seasonal patterns.
In a news conference this week, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York said he knew the state’s claims system wasn’t keeping up with the surge, and he said hundreds of people were working to expand capacity.
“The site is so deluged that it keeps crashing because you literally have hundreds of thousands of people at any time trying to get on the site,” he said. “I apologize for the pain. It must be infuriating.”
Economists, too, have struggled to keep pace with the speed of the collapse. A month ago, most forecasters still thought the United States could avoid a recession. Today, many economists are expecting a decline in gross domestic product that rivals the worst periods of the Great Depression.
On Friday, the Labor Department will release its monthly report on hiring and unemployment, usually one of the most-watched indicators on the economic calendar. But the data was collected in early March, an eon ago in the coronavirus age. Most forecasters expect it to show only a modest uptick in the unemployment rate and a small decline in jobs, despite the wave of layoffs that hit later in the month.
For workers and businesses, the reversal of fortune has been head-spinning.
Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/02/business/economy/coronavirus-unemployment-claims.html
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