Arkansas ranks 34th on the list of states with the biggest increase in unemployment claims since last week, and 41st in unemployment claims since the COVID-19 pandemic began.
Arkansas has seen a 118.26 percent change in unemployment claims when comparing the first full week in January versus the same week in 2019. There’s also a 116.23 percent change in unemployment claims when comparing the same week’s claims to the beginning of 2020.
Arkansas also has seen a 566.73 percent jump in unemployment claims when comparing claims from the beginning of the pandemic to the previous year, according to WalletHub.
Democratic states have more unemployment claims than Republican states, at 27.76 percent to 24.27 percent, WalletHub reports. States were designated as red or blue in the report by how they voted in the 2020 election.
Two COVID-19 vaccines are available, but it will still be months before they will be widely available.
With the pandemic raging across the country and COVID-19 lockdowns causing business openings to be stalled, the slowdown has had a negative impact on the bulk of the country's job market.
Currently, there are 10.7 million Americans who are unemployed due to COVID-19 restrictions. For the first full week of January, there were a total of 965,000 new unemployment claims across the country, which is an 86 percent reduction since the peak of the pandemic at 6.9 million.
WalletHub compared each of the 50 states, as well as Washington, D.C., across three separate metrics, comparing the first week in January to the same week in 2019, the same week to the start of 2020, and the start of the pandemic to the previous year.
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