New claims rise in recent report… COVID-19 still forcing layoffs and complete shutdowns
Published 2:11 pm Thursday, August 20, 2020
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Photo Contributed Unemployment benefit claims for Tennessee showed a bright glimpse as the number of new claims and continued claims show a decrease.
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BY IVAN SANDERS
STAR STAFF
ivan.sanders@elizabethton.com
After a couple of reporting periods that showed new unemployment claims going down, the most recent report released on August 15th revealed that those claims once again increased due to the pandemic forcing businesses to shutter operations temporarily or even closing down completely.
On August 8th, new files claimed had dropped to 10,036 but on the newest information released, new claims filed rose to 13,806 – an increase of 3,770 claims over the one week period.
While new claims did make a significant increase, the overall continue claims fell once again as during the last report there were 208,810 but for the one recently released, that number fell to 204,726 – a decrease of 4,084.
In terms of dollars, the Coronavirus Relief Fund has paid out $83,931,078 according to the report which may be inaccurate as the last report stated that the total amount of dollars spent totaled $196,867,280 from the fund.
There have been 795,116 total claims filed since March 15th of this year.
In the Northeast Tennessee area, Carter County reported 940 continued claims for the period. Sullivan County continues to lead the counties that fall in the Northeast Tennessee area with 3,638 total continued claims since March.
Washington County had the next highest continued claims with 2,888 while Greene County followed with 1,877.
Other counties that fall within the Northeast Tennesse area include Johnson County (170), Unicoi County (307), Hawkins County (1,120), and Hancock County (128).
