Yahoo Finance’s Emily McCormick joins the Yahoo Finance Live panel to discuss another 965K Americans filing new unemployment claims last week, states hardest hit by unemployment claims .

Video Transcript

AKIKO FUJITA: Well, the business closure stemming from the pandemic are continuing to weigh on the labor market. We got new data out this morning on that front, 965,000 Americans filing for new unemployment claims last week. Emily McCormick is following that story for us. And Emily, that is the highest level we have seen since August.

EMILY MCCORMICK: That's right, Akiko, major disappointment for this week's new weekly unemployment claims. Those, just to reiterate, coming in at 965,000, well above the 789,000 expected and the revised 784,000 that we saw during the previous week. Now, this rise and level of new unemployment claims is what Mark Hamrick at Bankrate actually called, quote, "shocking," really reminding us here that this economic crisis is still not under control, as we still see this increasing spread of the coronavirus pandemic across the country.

Now, taking a look at a state-by-state level, we did see most other states reporting increases in unadjusted new claims last week. Those were led by Illinois and Florida, which saw, by far, the greatest increases in new unadjusted claims, with those rising by more than 50,000 in each of those states. Now, taking a look at continuing jobless claims, which measure the total number of individuals still receiving regular state unemployment benefits, that metric also unexpectedly rose last week to a one-month high, that coming in at nearly 5.3 million and above the 5 million consensus and the nearly 5.1 million that we saw during the previous week.

And then taking a look at some of the other data that's also closely watched in the report, we still have more than 18 million Americans claiming unemployment benefits of some form. And that included 11.6 Americans on pandemic-era federal unemployment programs. So again, continuing to see a lot of struggles here in the labor market.

This, of course, coming after the December jobs report that we saw on Friday showed the first decrease in payroll since April. So a lot of recovery still needed here, as we head into 2021, potentially something that additional stimulus could alleviate. That's what a number of economists have said, as well. But for now, still seeing a bit of backsliding here in the labor market, Akiko and Zack.

ZACK GUZMAN: Yeah, I and we see-- I mean, we focus so much on that headline number, too. But when you rack up, as we do kind of week after week, month after month in this pandemic, interesting to see-- I mean, the Department of Labor also reports out state-by-state insured unemployment rates, which is, of course, the ratio of people on unemployment insurance divided by the labor force.

And we had seen Hawaii really topping that list for a number of weeks but now almost falling out of it. You think about what they did to ensure that travelers had to test negative before coming onto the islands in Hawaii, they're now just almost out of this list at 5.2% insured unemployment, and that's well below the 11% we saw just a few weeks ago. Interesting to see some of those other states, though, Nevada still one of those grappling with this as well. Another state levered, too, tourism and travel-- of course, Las Vegas still being one of those hardest-hit places. And California has had their own issues with lockdown yet again, here.

But kind of just returns to the point that Fed Chair Jay Powell has talked about in getting a handle on the virus first before you're going to see sustained economic recoveries on the state level, on the federal level. But of course, we keep seeing more talk about airlines maybe instituting some passports here to ensure negative tests as well.

It'll work for a state like Hawaii, which is an island. I wonder how much that's going to play in this recovery here, when we think about states by states and travel outside of just flying. But obviously, important to highlight all of that, too. And Akiko, in California, where you are at, still on this list-- not sure if cases recovering there is going to be any better.