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For the 11th straight week, at least 1,000 people filed for unemployment in Henrico County for the first time, according to statistics released today by the Virginia Employment Commission.
But the total number of first-time filers in the county continues to drop; a total of 1,056 Henricoans filed during the week of May 24 to 30, a decrease of about 21 percent from the previous week and the eighth straight week of decline.
For the second straight week, Henrico was seventh in the number of new filers, just two behind Loudoun County in Northern Virginia. Overall, 29,503 people in Henrico have filed for unemployment since the pandemic began in March – placing the county seventh statewide by that metric, too.
But only about 55 percent of county residents who filed initial claims during the first 10 weeks of the pandemic filed continuing claims during the most recent reporting week – and the number who did so actually dropped from the previous week for the first time during the pandemic.
In total, just more than 89,000 residents of Henrico, Chesterfield and Richmond have filed for unemployment during the past 11 reporting weeks, according to the VEC.
Statewide, slightly more than 31,300 people filed initial unemployment claims during the most recent week – a decrease of about 20 percent from the prior week. It was the lowest number of initial claims since before the pandemic spike occurred in mid-March.
Overall, more than 724,000 Virginians have filed initial claims since the beginning of the pandemic.
Wednesday, the VEC released its April employment data, which showed Henrico's unemployment rate at 11.1 percent. But the data also showed a significant drop in the county's overall civilian workforce – the number of people who are either working or seeking work – from about 185,300 to about 177,700. Such a drastic decline initially struck some Henrico officials as odd, but VEC officials told them that the decline was the result of people choosing to leave the workforce and a lower-than-normal response to a monthly household survey, which created a larger margin of error than normal.
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