Initial unemployment claims rose 68% in Montgomery County this past week, with people filing 15,751 claims, according to new figures released Thursday morning by the state’s Department of Labor.
Since the first week of March, 25,585 claims have been filed from Montgomery County, as the number of layoffs and furloughs connected to the damaging spread of coronavirus soared.
There were 108,508 total initial claims over the past week in the state, bringing the state’s total to 241,014 since the first week of March. The total for the last five weeks is more than Maryland had in either 2018 or 2019.
The numbers for Montgomery County since early March show the progression of economic fallout tied to the coronavirus.
In the first week of March, there were 195 initial claims. The next week, there were 245. As coronavirus ravaged the economy, claims rose to 3,941 the following week, then 9,394 last week.
Montgomery County’s total for the past week was the fifth highest in Maryland, behind Baltimore County, Prince George’s, Baltimore City and Anne Arundel.
In a series of posts on Twitter, Mike Ricci, a spokesman for Gov. Larry Hogan, posted Wednesday that the state took more claims in March than in all of 2019.
It’s taking an average of about 21 days to process claims and get first benefit payments out, he wrote.
Around 1,000 calls are made in every two-hour period, he wrote, which causes some calls to be dropped because the system can only handle so many at once.
“We are in the process of training more state employees to take claims,” Ricci wrote. “This isn’t something that can be done remotely. Trying to get 10 people in at a time to be trained.”
It takes about 30 minutes to file a claim, but longer if it’s a combined wage claim in multiple states, he said.
On its website, the Maryland Department of Labor said its website and call centers are experiencing an unprecedented volume of users because of the pandemic.
The website states that the system has been updated to allow people to file all the weekly claim certifications that haven’t been able to be filed since initial claims.
Federal employees and anyone who has worked in multiple states cannot file online.
Call center hours have been extended from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. Questions can be sent without waiting on hold to a new email address: ui.inquiry@maryland.gov.
Briana Adhikusuma can be reached at briana.adhikusuma@moco360.media.
