#684K filed in drop below pre-COVID record

The number of Americans seeking unemployment benefits dropped last week to its lowest level since the start of the coronavirus crisis, the feds said Thursday.

Last week’s 684,000 initial jobless claims brought the total for the COVID-19 pandemic to more than 82.5 million — a number more than twice the size of Iraq’s entire population.

But the figure finally fell below the pre-pandemic record of 695,000 after 52 consecutive weeks of painfully high levels of layoffs while beating economists’ expectations for 738,000 filings.

“This is likely a sign of even better things to come for the nation’s battered economy and the millions of individuals who are jobless, underemployed or have left the workforce but would like to work,” said Mark Hamrick, senior economic analyst at Bankrate.

Experts say there’s more light at the end of the tunnel with lockdowns loosening, vaccinations rising and warmer weather on the horizon.

In another sign that the job market is slowly healing, the four-week moving average for new jobless filings dropped by 736,000 last week from 749,000 the prior week, the US Department of Labor data show.

Next week’s closely watched jobs report for March is also expected to show the nation’s non-farm payrolls growing by 500,000 jobs this month, up from 379,000 in February, according to Wrightson ICAP.

“We’ll still need a few more weeks of data to make it official, but claims should start accelerating down now at a more rapid clip,” said Robert Frick, corporate economist at Navy Federal Credit Union. “Dropping infections and deaths are to thank, and while cases are on the rise in 20 states, the increasing pace of vaccinations should cause the overall decline in both COVID-19 cases and unemployment claims to continue.”

But the labor market is still a long way away from a full recovery. 

Workers filed more than twice as many initial jobless claims last week as they did in the second week of March 2020, federal data show. And out-of-work Americans claimed nearly 19 million weeks’ worth of state and federal unemployment benefits in the week ending March 6, the bulk of which were filed under special pandemic relief programs.