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Coronavirus job losses hit these states the hardest, according to record unemployment claims

National unemployment claims skyrocketed to over 3 million from 282,000, but coronavirus is hitting some states harder than others. Yahoo Finance’s Zack Guzman breaks down which states are reporting the largest spikes in unemployment claims.

Video Transcript

ZACK GUZMAN: Meantime, we're also looking into the way that on this record unemployment boom right now is playing out across the country. Of course, we got that update this morning. 3.283 million in jobless claims, that quadrupling the prior record. But when you look on a state level, it paints a very interesting picture for why potentially President Trump might be so optimistic in getting the economy and businesses reopened by that Easter deadline that he's floating right now.

Because when you look at it, unemployment changes week to week in some of these key swing states is pretty large when you compare them to the rest of the country. Want to highlight just a few states we saw. Ohio, with a jump of about 180,000 jobless claims. That being more than a 2,500% rise.

Not just Ohio, look at Pennsylvania and Michigan also seeing more than 2,300% rise. And the key swing state of Virginia, which of course has recently gone blue, also seeing about a 1,600% percent increase week to week when we look at jobless claims filed in those states.

So very interesting here in the way that it may be impacting the 2020 election. Of course, we already saw President Trump's admittedly own scorecard here, his own report card, kind of wiped off the table when we look at stock gains since he became president briefly getting completely wiped off the table. We've seen a little bit of a rebound over the last couple days, but Brian, you start to wonder if some of these key swing states continue to see jobless claims rise, what that could do when we get to November?

- Yeah, absolutely, and I think the question here is really going to be the regional aspects of the country that actually have yet to see the full impact of the coronavirus. We need to consider New Orleans, for example, the state of Louisiana. There are a lot of questions maybe at the onset that because of the warmer weather, maybe those southern states wouldn't be hit as much.

You also have the statistical challenge of the fact that a lot of parts of the country don't have access to an abundance of those test kits where you can even verify to what degree you have the coronavirus impacting the many communities across your area. So I think that the developing story is really still kind of in the woodworks here as we advance through what is still kind of the early onset of the coronavirus pandemic in the United States, right?

I mean, we've known that this was going to come. We knew that this was going to impact us in some way, but it isn't until basically two or three weeks to now when we really start to see that bleed through the data. So I think as we get through the weeks, we should expect it to progress worse. I think we should expect to see other parts of the country that we have not actually observed anything yet start to feel that as well.

ZACK GUZMAN: Yeah, and really, when you dig into that Department of Labor report, you're seeing sectors across the board getting hit. California, the service industry some of the hardest hit, transportation, warehousing, food services. All of these states reporting layoffs. And as the headline number does indicate, just a massive spike that we have not seen the likes of before.