“Everything that should be up is up and everything that should be down is down,” Gov. Gavin Newsom said in January when lifting California’s regional stay-at-home order.
Today, that statement holds true for many aspects of California’s pandemic response — vaccinations are up, infections are down, hospitalizations are down — but rings hollow when it comes to the state unemployment department, where numbers are trending in the wrong direction. According to figures released Thursday, the Employment Development Department’s backlog of unresolved claims had ballooned to 1.08 million as of May 1, up from 1.05 million the week before and 1.03 million the week before that. The logjam has contained more than 1 million claims for 13 straight weeks.
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