Chart of the day

The total number of initial unemployment claims for unemployment compensation in the United State continues to rise.

This morning, the U.S. Department of Labor (pdf) reported that, during the week ending last Saturday, another 1.19 million American workers filed initial claims for unemployment compensation. That means initial jobless claims exceeded one million for the twentieth week in a row.

Here is a breakdown of each week:

• week ending on 21 March—3.31 million

• week ending on 28 March—6.87 million

• week ending on 4 April—6.62 million

• week ending on 11 April—5.24 million

• week ending on 18 April—4.44 million

• week ending on 25 April—3.87 million

• week ending on 2 May—3.18 million

• week ending on 9 May—2.69 million

• week ending on 16 May—2.45 million

• week ending on 23 May—2.12 million

• week ending on 30 May—1.90 million

• week ending on 6 June—1.57 million

• week ending on 13 June—1.54 million

• week ending on 20 June—1.48 million

• week ending on 27 June—1.41 million

• week ending on 4 July—1.31 million

• week ending on 11 July—1.31 million

• week ending on 18 July—1.42 million

• week ending on 25 July—1.44 million

• week ending on 1 August—1.19 million

All told, 55.3 million American workers have filed initial unemployment claims during the past twenty weeks.

To put that into  perspective, I produced the chart above comparing the cumulative totals of the initial unemployment claims for the current pandemic compared to two other relevant periods: the worst point of the Second Great Depression (from mid-January to late May 2009) and the weeks immediately preceding the current depression (from early November 2019 to late March 2020).

As readers can see, the differences are stunning: 12.6 million workers during the Second Great Depression, 4.4 million in the period just before the COVID crisis, and more than 55 million in the past twenty weeks.

And now that emergency federal benefits have expired, the unemployed—both continuing cases and newly laid-off workers—will not be receiving the $600-a-week supplement that helped them pay their bills through the spring and early summer.

In the meantime, at least 1,253 new coronavirus deaths and 53,726 new cases were reported in the United States. As of this morning, more than 4,832,400 Americans have been infected with the coronavirus and at least 158,500 have died. The three-day rolling average of new cases per million people in the country was 157 compared to 31 cases for the world as a whole.

We can therefore expect to see new waves of business closures, which in turn will mean more American workers furloughed and laid off, and therefore a steady stream of initial unemployment claims, in the weeks and months ahead.

As Vijay Prashad [ht: ja] has explained,

The incompetence of the Trump administration—mirroring the dangerous incompetence of Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil and Narendra Modi of India—coming on top of a destroyed public health system and a failed private sector testing establishment has condemned millions of people in the U.S. to catch the disease and pass it on. There is—thus far—no prospect of breaking the chain of infection in the United States.

Cartoon of the day

Special mention

“Bloody Lowndes”

By the 1960s, it was known as “Bloody Lowndes”—because of the long history of lynchings and other forms of racial terrorism against the poor, majority-black population. Then, they began to fight back, with the assistance of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, forming the the Lowndes County Freedom Organization, which was the first independent black political party in the county since Reconstruction.

But the county remained poor, with a median household income of only $25,876 and a poverty rate of 28.5 percent, with a still-declining population that has been mostly consigned to oblivion.

Lowndes has been largely forgotten—until yesterday, when a new study was published concerning the health of the county’s residents.

What is remarkable is that the study was published in The American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene and it documents a high incidence of hookworm, an infection that affects 430 million people worldwide, causing iron deficiency, impaired cognitive development, and stunting in children.

This was supposed to be a parasite found only in poor, Third World countries, with poor sanitation and a natural environment suitable for the hookworm life-cycle. It’s a public health problem that I vividly remember from all my years working in and teaching development economics, especially in Latin America.

But here we are in the United States—where hookworm had been rampant, especially in the deep south, in the earlier twentieth century. But by the 1980s public health experts assumed the parasite and the attendant public-health problems had disappeared altogether. However, the authors of the study found that more than one third (34.5 percent) of the participants tested positive for Necator americanus, the American species of hookworm.

Clearly, the authors understand the significance and implications of their study:

The discovery of these parasitic diseases within the United States begins to shift the idea behind global health. One concept is blue marble health, which reveals that many of the world’s neglected tropical diseases are paradoxically found in some of the wealthiest countries, especially in these small regions of extreme poverty.