Number of new unemployment claims in Mississippi dropped last week

Weekly new unemployment claims in Mississippi dropped for the second time in several weeks according to information from the U.S. Department of Labor.

Normally, Mississippi’s new unemployment claims number less than 1,000 a month.

Unemployment shot up in the wake of the COVID-19 crisis as businesses closed their doors. In Mississippi, the increase in new unemployment claims began a steady rise in mid-March, reaching their highest point the week ending April 4, with 45,852 new claims.

Claims dropped slightly, by 104 claims, for the week ending April 11 but dropped by 9,905 for the week ending April 18.

Since mid-March, Mississippi has seen more than 166,000 new unemployment claims.

Nationally, 4,427,000 Americans filed new claims for unemployment for the week ending April 18, which was down 810,000 from the previous week.

The national, seasonally adjusted unemployment rate was 11% for the week ending April 11, an increase of 2.8 percentage points from the previous week’s unrevised rate. This marks the highest level of the seasonally adjusted insured unemployment rate in the history of the seasonally adjusted series