Filings for unemployment benefits remained high last week. Exactly how high? Depending on which news outlet or social media feeds you're watching today, you might have seen a figure of 833,000 new jobless claims, or 881,000, or 1.6 million. What's going on? The issue is that the pandemic has messed with normally predictable seasonal patterns in layoffs, so the Labor Department this week changed its seasonal adjustment methodology. The 881,000 number is the number of seasonally adjusted state claims. It's a perfectly valid number -- probably more accurate than the earlier seasonally adjusted numbers. But there's a problem: Because of the change, the new number isn't comparable to the old ones. As a result, many news organizations, including The New York Times , are using NON-seasonally adjusted numbers instead. That's the 833,000 number. Neither of those numbers include the 759,000 people who filed for benefits under the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program. Add those in and you get to 1.6 million. No matter what numbers you use, though, the big picture is the same: Unemployment remains very high, and is falling only slowly.
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