Despite the fact that US authorities insist the labor market is recovering from recession caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, those reliefs ramped up by 7,000 to complete 207,000 in the week ending January 1.

The advance number of actual initial claims under state programs, unadjusted, totaled 315,469 in the week ending January 1, an increase of 57,599 (or 22.3%) from the previous week. The seasonal factors had expected an increase of 50,464 (or 19.6%) from the previous week. There were 898,610 initial claims in the comparable week in 2021.

According to the Labor Department, the labor market is tightening, as subsidy requests dropped from 6.14 billion in early April 2020.

Generally speaking, 1.8 million unemployed people received benefits last week, 154,000 less than the previous one, under average of 220,000 per week before the pandemic hit domestic economy in March 2020, as about 22,4 million jobs were lost in the United States.

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