Employment Recovery In Connecticut Is Lagging: Report

CONNECTICUT — The state continues to dole out the coronavirus vaccine like free ice cream on a hot summer day. As of Apr. 19, Connecticut had administered 77,706 doses per 100,000 population, second only to New Hampshire in per capita administration.

But is all that jabbing bringing residents back to work more quickly? A new report from personal finance researchers WalletHub suggests unemployment in Connecticut is not bouncing back as quickly as our straight "A" report card from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention might merit.

In order to identify the states whose unemployment rates are bouncing back most, WalletHub compared the 50 states and the District of Columbia based on five key metrics that compare unemployment rate statistics across the pandemic. Connecticut has the third-worst rate of unemployment recovery, behind Hawaii and New York, by their scorecard.

In the first category, WalletHub compared the change in unemployment for March 2021 to March 2019, March 2020 and January 2020, in order to show the impact since 2019 and since the beginning of last year. The researchers also compared not seasonally adjusted continued claims in March 2021 to March 2019. In the second category, WalletHub looked at the state’s overall unemployment rate, and then used the average of those categories to rank the states.

What appeared to hurt Connecticut most in the rankings was its 8.3 percent unemployment rate in March 2021, which was the 3rd highest in the U.S. Those 143,201 residents still unemployed a year after the start of the pandemic represented the 6th worst recovery from March 2019 (74,412 unemployed), 5th worst from March 2020 (80,956 unemployed) and 11th worst from January 2020 (81,459).

The state's lone bright metric was found in its change in not seasonally adjusted continued claims from March 2019 (41,127 claims) to March 2021, (73,919 claims), the 20th best recovery in the category.

By way of comparison, the U.S. unemployment rate sits at 6 percent, which is still high but is much lower than the nearly historic high of 14.7 percent in April 2020.

Although the unemployment rates serve as a good baseline, when we will see a complete economic recovery in a world with a lingering personal interaction hesitancy makes for a tough call, according to some economic experts.

"Assuming that an effective vaccine creates global immunity, many of the hardest-hit sectors should be able to reestablish themselves. However, it could take a decade - or a generation - for them to reestablish themselves," said Michael A. Leeds, professor of Economics at Temple University. "I find it very hard to predict the medium term (the next 5-15 years) because my instincts for what our 'new reality' dictates - a shift away from jobs that require personal interaction - is precisely the opposite of what I see as the general trend for the economy. By that, I mean that the impersonal, more mechanistic jobs are precisely the ones that technological advances (e.g., self-driving delivery vans) are making obsolete."