2.4M claimed jobless benefits last week, bringing total to nearly 39M since mid-March

The number of jobless workers who applied for unemployment benefits last week was 2.4 million, the Labor Department reported Thursday.

Economists had projected 2.4 million new jobless claims.

The number of workers seeking aid remains historically high but has dropped considerably from the nearly 7 million claims that were filed the week ending March 28. Still, losing millions of jobs a week for weeks at a time was unheard of before the pandemic, and some economists expected that jobless claims would drop more precipitously. Ian Shepherdson, chief economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics, wrote Wednesday that economists have become “less hopeful of a quick drop in jobless claims below the one million mark.”

Since the economy halted in mid-March to slow the spread of the coronavirus, nearly 39 million workers have filed for unemployment benefits, an unprecedented figure since the federal government began tracking unemployment in the 1930s.

However, the true number of people who lost work is likely higher since self-employed and gig workers who lost their jobs, and for the first time can claim unemployment benefits, are not included in the Labor Department’s count. These jobless workers are counted at the state level, but a precise number is hard to nail down since states have been overwhelmed in processing the surge of unemployment claims. Last week's new claims were more than 10 times higher than the number of new claims in the same week a year ago.

Some industries are suffering unemployment rates that exceed those from the Great Depression. More than half of the travel industry's 15.8 million workers, 51%, have been laid off during the coronavirus pandemic, the U.S. Travel Association announced Tuesday. During the Great Depression, the unemployment rate peaked at 24.9% in 1933.