47,000 jobless claims in last week of April as push grows to reopen amid COVID-19

The number of new jobless claims in South Carolina has decreased for the third week in a row, the Department of Employment and Workforce reported on Thursday.

DEW received 46,747 initial jobless claims between April 26 and May 2, a decrease of 18,412 between April 26 and May 2. At least 453,636 South Carolinians applied for unemployment benefits since the outbreak began in S.C., reflecting historic levels of unemployment across the country as the COVID-19 crisis continues.

DEW has paid out $831 million in state unemployment benefits, Federal Pandemic Unemployment Compensation (FPUC) and Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) in the past seven weeks, the agency said.

The FPUC program, funded by the federal CARES Act, gives $600 extra per week to South Carolinians who previously qualified for unemployment in the state, on top of the state benefits they already receive. The PUA program expands unemployment benefits to cover workers who otherwise wouldn’t qualify, or who were deeply affected financially by the COVID-19 outbreak.

South Carolina still has not begun accepting claims for Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation (PEUC), a third federal program that extends unemployment benefits to 39 weeks for those who have already exhausted the 20 weeks S.C. allows. DEW said it would launch PEUC in coming weeks, but did not specify a date.

The state labor agency said it is handling an unprecedented number of new claims. It’s a historic unemployment crisis that is expected to drain the state’s unemployment trust fund and require South Carolina to seek a federal loan, officials said.

Even as health officials warn of more COVID-19 cases to come as people return to public life, some state leaders see a plateau in the number of new cases as encouragement to reopen.

S.C. Gov. Henry McMaster, who pledged to have business “humming” by the summer, allowed certain nonessential businesses to reopen two weeks after they were ordered to close. He then allowed restaurants to resume on-site, outdoor dining. Other parts of the state’s economy have also begun reopening. Hospitals have rescheduled some elective procedures they halted in March, schools are organizing socially distant graduation ceremonies, and colleges are making plans to reopen their campuses come fall. McMaster said Wednesday that he would announce additional reopenings later this week.

While the nation has been shut down for about two months, the COVID-19 virus still confounds many doctors and researchers. One of the defining characteristics of the disease is the wide range of immune responses to it, physicians say.

Public health leaders don’t know the full scope of COVID-19 in South Carolina, in large part due to limited testing capabilities in the state’s hospitals, said Tod Augsburger, CEO of Lexington Medical Center. But it is also unknown how many asymptomatic patients there are, how the virus affects certain populations or whether widespread, long-term immunity is possible. There is still no known treatment, cure or vaccine, although antiviral drug remdesivir and blood plasma therapies have shown some initial positive results.

South Carolina has not met several of the key benchmarks set by federal health officials, including widespread contact tracing and testing, and a consistent 14-day downward trend in new cases. As of May 6, at least 300 people had died from COVID-19 in the state, DHEC said.

The state made strides this week by adding pop-up testing sites and saying it would hire many more contact tracers. The city of Columbia said it would provide free testing to employees of local businesses.

DHEC created a plan to ramp up its testing efforts, including by testing all employees and residents of South Carolina nursing homes — about 40,000 people — for COVID-19. Previous data showed that up to half of nursing home residents who tested positive for COVID-19 were asymptomatic, according to DHEC.

This story was originally published May 7, 2020 at 8:49 AM with the headline "47,000 jobless claims in last week of April as push grows to reopen amid COVID-19."