In the two weeks that ended on March 28, Colorado verified the unemployment insurance claims for 81,328 individuals, just short of the 84,000 people who received unemployment benefits in all of 2018.

“Sunday through yesterday, we are almost to 40,000 applications,” said Cher Roybal Haavind, the deputy executive director for the Colorado Department of Labor & Employment. The recent change to only permit people to file on alternate days depending on the first letter of their last name “seems to have really helped our workload and our volume into the system,” she added.

Per day, CDLE sees approximately 10,000 to 15,000 applications. The number of total applications is higher than the number of reported claims, as claims have gone through the verification processes necessary to begin payment.

Haavind said that in the past couple of weeks, the department doubled its call center staffing to approximately 150 people. CDLE is exploring the possibility of using volunteers in other state agencies and elsewhere in the department, or employing outside contractors to take calls.

During the last recession, Colorado received 522,000 claims total in 2009 and 2010. The highest number of claims filed in a single week during that time was 7,749, a fraction of the 61,583 claims last week. A survey from the University of Colorado’s Leeds Business Confidence Index released on Tuesday found that compared to the recession, where economic projections underwent a slower quarterly decline, there was an abrupt drop over the past quarter due to COVID-19.

Colorado residents who submitted applications beginning on March 16 are beginning to receive payments, a much faster timeline than the traditional four- to six-week wait. Haavind said that “pre-COVID, on any given day we were getting around 1,000 calls into our call center. Monday, we had 225,000 call attempts,” which included those who were put on hold or who encountered busy signals. The online system was “absolutely” the best way to file an application, she said.

The federal CARES Act expanded unemployment insurance to cover self-employed workers and independent contractors, as well as to boost benefits by $600 per week. CDLE is awaiting guidance from the U.S. Department of Labor, as the enhanced benefits will be federally funded. The department advises people whose occupations are newly covered to hold off on applying for unemployment insurance until the state can reconfigure its application. For people who filed before the passage of the bill, the additional $600 payment will be retroactive.

Nationwide, for the week ending March 28, 6.6 million Americans filed for unemployment benefits, double the 3.3 million during the prior seven days. The Associated Press reported that just 6% of companies say they are hiring, compared to 40% before the outbreak, and the Economic Policy Institute found that all 50 states recorded their highest ever numbers of claims in the past two weeks.

Ryan Gedney, a senior economist at CDLE, noted that during 2019, the state paid out an average of $7.1 million per week for unemployment claims. During 2009-2010, the number spiked to $19 million.

“I anticipate that the amount of benefits paid out for the week ending April 4 will easily exceed $20 million,” he said.

Figures specific to individual industries arrive on a three-week lag, and therefore the most up-to-date figures go as far back as March 14, more than one week before the statewide stay-at-home order and prior to the massive increase in claims. At that point, workers in the leisure and hospitality industries represented 28% of all claims, reflecting widespread restaurant closures and canceled cultural events and group gatherings.

“Leisure and hospitality historically represents between 7% and 9% of industry-level claims at a given time,” Gedney said.