Mar 28, 2020 2 min read

Some 700,000 workers in Pennsylvania filed for unemployment benefits in just the last two weeks as measures intended to slow the spread of COVID-19 infections result in widespread layoffs and business closures.

As of Thursday, the state Department of Labor and Industry was reporting that it had received almost 319,000 unemployment claims just this week, in addition to 378,000 last week.

Gov. Tom Wolf said that day he expected the total to reach 800,000 by the end of the week. Pennsylvania accounts for 10% of all jobless claims nationwide. Last Monday – the same day Wolf asked non-life-sustaining businesses to close to curb new cases of the highly contagious respiratory illness – the state waived the usual one-week waiting period usually required and suspended job-search requirements.

It is unclear when businesses will be allowed to reopen as the number of reported cases continues to climb across the state. In just two weeks, it roughly tripled the share of the workforce that’s now jobless.

At the end of February, before the pandemic took on the urgency it now carries with state officials, there were a total of 309,000 people considered unemployed statewide, according to DLI figures. Those jobless people represented 4.7% of the state’s workforce. Unemployment figures don’t include most students, people who are incarcerated and others who aren’t looking for work.

National figures released yesterday show a total of 3.3 million Americans filed for unemployment benefits just last week – more than four times the 695,000 claims that set the previous record. That previous high occurred in 1982, the Washington Post reported.