New Florida unemployment claims top 200,000
May 14, 2020 - Floridians filed 221,905 first-time claims for unemployment benefits in the week ended May 9. Only two other states — Connecticut and Georgia — had a larger number of initial claims last week, according to a report from the U.S. Department of Labor. Since March 14, when many businesses started to reduce their operations to slow the spead of Covid-19, 1.98 million Floridians have filed first-time unemployment benefit claims. Nationally, there are about 36.5 million newly unemployed Americans since the start of the pandemic, according to The Hill. That includes 2.6 million people nationally who applied for initial unemployment claims last week.