We continue to look at new weekly claims for unemployment insurance as a proxy for the general direction of the economy. At the national level, claims for the week ending August 8 dropped on a seasonally-adjusted basis from about 1.2 million to 963,000 (rounded). Note that the latest figure is always preliminary. Without seasonal adjustment, the figure fell from 988,000 to 832,000. So at the national level, it looks as though the recovery continues although - in absolute terms - things are pretty bad.
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For California, the situation is more ambiguous. Over a fourth of new claims came from California. The previous week, California accounted for just under a fifth of those collecting unemployment benefits, a disproportionate share that appears to be growing. (California figures are not seasonally adjusted.) The California lag probably reflects the tightening up of the coronavirus-related restrictions that were put in place.*
Although there was a well-publicized SNAFU in data reports of new coronavirus cases (which got the state's director of Public Health removed), the data on new hospital cases suggest a downward trend, which is a Good Thing.
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*The latest weekly data are at
https://www.dol.gov/sites/dolgov/files/OPA/newsreleases/ui-claims/20201574.pdf.
**Data from the UC-Irvine database:
https://www.stat.uci.edu/covid19/index.html.
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