The number of jobs lost due to the coronavirus shutdown continue to mount, with the latest weekly total of Americans applying for unemployment benefits topping 830,000. Yahoo Finance's Emily McCormick joins Zack Guzman to discuss.

Video Transcript

ZACK GUZMAN: Want to kick off the show with the update we got on the unemployment front here as, again, we've got the Department of Labor giving us the latest weekly initial jobless claims totals, and those actually ticked down by about 36,000. For the headline number as well as the full report here, want to get to Yahoo Finance's Emily McCormick who has the details. Emily.

EMILY MCCORMICK: Well, Zack, we saw a bigger than expected improvement in new jobless claims this morning, though those are still elevated on historical basis. Now, specifically, new claims totaled 837,000 last week for a print better than the 850,000 expected and upwardly revised 873,000 we saw during the prior week. Now, this marked the fifth straight week that new jobless claims came in below the one million mark. We also saw a decline in the seasonally unadjusted claims to reaffirm that improvement.

Now, that said, we're still well above pre-pandemic levels when it comes to new claims, since those had been coming in at a rate of about 200,000 per week as recently as February this year. Now, I also want to point out that there is a big caveat in this morning's report, and that is that California, the state that has consistently shown the largest number of jobless claims and increases in claims each week, is taking a two week pause in processing initial claims. Now, the state is using that time to reduce its claims processing backlog and add fraud prevention technology. But in the meantime, we are getting updates on new claims from California, so that certainly will be something to watch in the weeks to come to see if there is give back here once those claims are counted again for that state.

Now, taking a look at the data that we do have, the majority of states did report improvements on an unadjusted basis in new claims last week. We saw that led by Florida with a decline of 9,600 claims to about 29,000 last week. We also saw Texas and Georgia reporting sizable declines in new claims. Now, on the flip side, do want to point out that Maryland and Illinois each added the most new claims at 2,800 and 1,900 respectively. And also want to note that the nationwide continuing claims count fell below 12 million for the first time since April in this past week's report. Those were at 11.77 million versus 12.2 million expected and 12.75 million during the prior week. Zack.