May jobs report: US economy unexpectedly adds 2.5 million payrolls, unemployment rate falls to 13.3%
YAHOO
The May jobs report showed an unexpected rise in non-farm payrolls across the economy and a drop in the unemployment rate from April, averting what economists expected would be a rise in the jobless rate to the highest level since the Great Depression amid the coronavirus pandemic.
The Labor Department released the May jobs report Friday at 8:30 a.m. ET. Here were the main results from the report, compared to Bloomberg consensus data:
- Change in non-farm payrolls: +2.509 million vs. -7.5 million expected and -20.687 million in April
- Unemployment rate: 13.3% vs. 19.0% expected and 14.7% in April
- Average hourly earnings month on month: -1.0% vs. +1.0% expected and +4.7% in April
- Average hourly earnings year on year: +6.7% vs. +8.5% expected and +8.0% in April
The Labor Department’s surveys captured the period including the 12th of the month, meaning the May report included the very early stages of reopening in some parts of the U.S. amid the coronavirus outbreak. But the rise in non-farm payrolls still exceeded all economist expectations, with no economists included in Bloomberg’s survey having predicted a rise in jobs during the month of May. Stocks rallied strongly following the report.
“Total nonfarm payroll employment increased by 2.5 million in May, reflecting a limited resumption of economic activity that had been curtailed due to the coronavirus pandemic and efforts to contain it,” the BLS said in its statement Friday.
The private services sector recovered 2.425 million payrolls in May after shedding 17.351 million in April. Leisure and hospitality – far and away the hardest-hit industry group in April, with more than 7.5 million jobs lost – saw the largest rebound, with 1.24 million positions added in May.
Education and health services industries added 424,000 payrolls in May after shedding 2.59 million in April. Retail trade, wholesale trade, financial activities, and professional and business services also added jobs for the month.
Within the services sector, only the transportation and warehousing, utilities, and information industries extended job losses from April.
The goods-producing sector also added jobs, with these rising 669,000 after declining by 2.373 million in April. Manufacturing payrolls rose by 225,000, recovering some of the 1.324 million payrolls lost during the prior month.
Government payrolls, however, extended declines, with these falling by 585,000 after a drop of 963,000 in April.
The broad-based gains in payroll employment “indicates that the process of rehiring began sooner than the jobless claims figures suggested,” said Michael Pearce, senior U.S. economist for Capital Economics. “With more states moving to loosen their lockdowns in the coming weeks, particularly in the populous Northeast, employment looks set to continue rebounding in June and beyond, although we still think it will be a long time before the labor market is anywhere near back to its pre-virus state.”
Friday’s jobs report also included an unexpected improvement in the unemployment rate to 13.3%, after hitting the highest level in BLS monthly survey history in April at 14.7%. Most economists expected the jobless rate would climb further to nearly 20% in May, reflecting those still unemployed amid ongoing virus-related business disruptions. The monthly unemployment rate was estimated to have peaked at about 25% during the Great Depression in 1933.
Coronavirus cases are climbing again in the South and the West. Will crowded protests spark bigger outbreaks?
YAHOOFor months Americans were cooped up at home, doing their part to slow the spread of the coronavirus. But in recent days tens of thousands of them have filled the streets in at least 380 cities and towns across all 50 states to protest police brutality and systemic racism — threats they believe are even more dangerous to people of color than COVID-19.
They are marching shoulder-to-shoulder for hours on end. They are chanting, shouting and singing, often without masks. Meanwhile, police officers are spraying them with cough-inducing tear gas, herding them into tight corners and loading the hundreds they arrest into buses, vans and holding cells.
The question now is whether this apparent recipe for COVID-19 disaster will spark a resurgence right when the United States seemed to be getting its epidemic under control.
Experts and epidemiologists say that we won’t know the answer for weeks. After infection, symptoms can take up to 14 days to present; testing positive or requiring hospitalization can take even longer. Today’s data is a window into the past.
Yet today’s data, it turns out, is worrisome enough.
While the country has shifted its attention from the pathogen to the protests, and while COVID-19 infections have continued to decline in some of America’s hardest-hit cities, cases have been climbing elsewhere — especially in the South and the West, and most of all in states that moved to reopen early.
More than a month has passed since the first wave of reopenings — enough time to start to gauge the impact of looser restrictions, increased interaction and more relaxed attitudes toward social distancing.
The fact that infections already appear to be increasing in places that have taken these relatively tentative steps back toward normalcy suggests that the coronavirus may start to spread even more rapidly and widely as a result of the tinderbox-like conditions at today’s mass protests.
Last Wednesday this column singled out South Carolina as an example of one of the 17 or so states where coronavirus is on the rise. It’s worth checking back in to see how the situation has evolved since then.
At the time, the Palmetto State had just posted the country’s biggest increase in new COVID-19 cases: 42.4 percent, according to the Reuters coronavirus database, which measures and compares the total number of new cases each week.
For the week ending Sunday, May 31, South Carolina saw an additional 37.9 percent jump in new cases — the fourth-highest in the nation and the state’s highest weekly total since the pandemic began.
And while South Carolina has conducted more testing in recent weeks, testing alone does not account for the uptick in COVID-19 infections there. In fact, the state conducted more tests per day between May 12 and May 19 than it did between May 27 and June 2 — 150 more, on average — yet it found 663 more new cases during the latter week than the former.
Meanwhile, the percentage of positive COVID-19 tests in South Carolina has more than doubled over the last two weeks, rising from about 3 percent to 7 percent, according to the state’s Department of Health and Environmental Control. Hospitalizations have increased as well, remaining above 400 for three straight days. And the state’s Rt — an epidemiological statistic that represents transmissibility, or the number of people a sick person infects at a particular point in an epidemic — is now estimated to be 1.08. An Rt below 1.0 indicates that each person infects, on average, less than one other person; an Rt above 1.0 indicates that an outbreak is growing.
In Virginia, cases were up 42.8 percent week-over-week. In Alabama they were up 39.9 percent. In Kentucky they were up 28.3 percent. In Utah they were up 21.8 percent. In Texas they were up 18.2 percent. States that also saw double-digit increases included Mississippi, Arkansas, Wisconsin and North Carolina — which was scheduled to host the Republican National Convention in August, until President Trump balked at Gov. Roy Cooper’s insistence on measures to prevent it from seeding a new coronavirus outbreak. Even Washington (up 9 percent) and California (up 28.9 percent) — two early-to-lockdown states that were among the first to bend the curve — saw weekly infections rise.
More up-to-the-minute data from Johns Hopkins — which averages new daily cases over the last five days — hints at additional states that may soon join this list,
including Tennessee, Alaska, Montana and Missouri, where shirtless, maskless, spring-break-style revelers were filmed packing into a pool at the Lake of the Ozarks over Memorial Day weekend.
But if infections start to climb in as many as 20 states when people simply start to return to normal, then what will happen after they gather in conditions that could be far more conducive to the spread of COVID-19?
We’ll know more in a few weeks.
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Why Georgia’s reopening hasn’t led to a surge in coronavirus cases (so far)
Georgia’s experience could teach us a lot about Covid-19 and its spread.
Georgia was the first state to start reopening its economy after shutting down due to the coronavirus pandemic. When the shelter-in-place order expired on April 30, a lot of experts and much of the public worried about the worst: a sustained spike in Covid-19 cases that would overwhelm emergency rooms and lead to a surge in deaths.
Yet more than a month later, the worst hasn’t arrived
Even as the state has increased its testing capacity, boosting its ability to pick up new coronavirus cases, the total of daily new cases has remained relatively flat, despite some ups and downs. The state isn’t getting significantly better — dozens of Covid-19 deaths are still reported each day in Georgia — but it doesn’t seem to be getting much worse either.
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It’s possible this data doesn’t tell the full story — maybe the state is underreporting or even manipulating the data to look better, which Georgia has already been caught doing at times.
But if that were the case, coronavirus would still show up in hospitals — by way of sick patients. Based on data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention taken from hospitals, that doesn’t seem to be happening either: With about 6 percent of inpatient beds occupied by Covid-19 patients, Georgia is, again, not doing great. But it’s not in the 10 worst states nationally, with several states that started to reopen later ahead.
I turned to experts with one question: Why isn’t Georgia, at least so far, experiencing the worst-case scenario that some expected?
There’s also the real possibility of data manipulation. Georgia has not proven itself to be above this. Until recently, it was including a type of test into its test count that experts say shouldn’t be included. It has also, for example, published a chart that switched dates in a way that, deliberately or not, made the state’s data look more favorable.
“It is very difficult to sort out where we are in Georgia,” Melanie Thompson, a principal investigator at the AIDS Research Consortium of Atlanta, told me. “We have some confusing issues with our data and the way they are reported by the state of Georgia on their website.”
Aside from that, experts said other factors could play a role. Maybe people are staying home even though the shelter-in-place order is over. Perhaps masks and other practices people have adopted as a result of the pandemic, like washing our hands more thoroughly, are playing a big role in driving down transmission even as people go out more. It’s possible the warmer weather could help — or there could be some other factor we don’t know about, even just luck, that could play a driving role.
1) It’s too early
It’s been a month since Georgia’s shelter-in-place order. In theory, that gives enough time for the virus to spread and incubate in people.
But life doesn’t always work like theory, and there are several reasons new coronavirus cases could take longer than two weeks — maybe even months — to start going up after a government ends its shelter-in-place order.
People have to go out more. They have to get infected, and, typically, symptoms have to show. They have to get tested for the virus. That sample then has to be processed before it’s reported as a completed test. That test has to be reported to Georgia’s government. The state then has to report the test results.
And even if cases do start to pick up at any particular point, a full outbreak can take time to get going. Daily reported cases in Georgia initially sat below 100 for much of March before quickly shooting up to the hundreds through late March and early April.2) There might be some data manipulation
At the least, one can say that the Georgia Department of Public Health has had some major glitches with its coronavirus data reporting. At the worst, there could be some manipulation going on.
As Willoughby Mariano and J. Scott Trubey reported for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the state in May posted a chart that seemed to show that “new confirmed cases in the counties with the most infections had dropped every single day for the past two weeks.” Upon closer inspection, the chart was extremely misleading — displaying two Sundays in one week and putting data from May 2 before data for April 26. It seemed like an attempt to create a downward slope where there wasn’t one.
Georgia officials later apologized for the original version of the chart.
But this wasn’t the first or last time that Georgia got caught making a mess of its data. Mariano and Trubey noted in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, “This unforced error — at least the third in as many weeks — is confounding observers who have noted sloppiness in case counts, death counts and other measures that are fundamental to tracking a disease outbreak.”
More recently, Georgia was caught including the wrong kind of test in its test count.
According to experts, the main test for the daily counts should be diagnostic tests. Those gauge whether a person has the virus in their system and is, therefore, sick right at the moment of the test. Antibody tests check if someone ever developed antibodies to the virus to see if they had ever been sick in the past. Since diagnostic tests give a more recent gauge of the level of infection, they’re seen as much more reliable for evaluating the current state of the Covid-19 outbreak in a state.
3) People are staying home anyway
Before governments told people to stay home, many people were staying home anyway.
Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp didn’t issue a shelter-in-place order until April 2 — making the state among the last to shut down. But OpenTable data indicates that dine-in seating fell by more than 90 percent by the end of March compared to the previous year. A mix of individual behavioral changes, local and other state government actions, federal advisories, and other factors led people to stay home, shelter-in-place order or not.
Similarly, after Georgia’s shelter-in-place order expired, dining in has remained suppressed: As of June 4, it’s down more than 75 percent compared to the year before. That’s more people out than several weeks prior, when dining in was down by 80 to 90 percent, but it’s still a lot of empty restaurant seats.
Data from Google, which tracks people’s movement through their Google accounts, tells a similar story: Georgians are starting to trickle out more, but they’re still going out less than they were before. As of May 29, retail and recreation outings are down 16 percent compared to a baseline based on activity before the coronavirus. Transit stations are down 38 percent. Workplaces are down 36 percent, and grocery stores and pharmacies are down 4 percent. Meanwhile, residential places — meaning, where people stay home — are up 13 percent.
Only parks, which have a relatively low risk of transmission, are up 44 percent.
Again, this is slowly changing; people are trickling out more, bit by bit. The past week of protests over police brutality have led to a lot of people showing up in large gatherings, including in Atlanta. This speaks to why it’s too early to judge Georgia’s experience: Things could change as more people get out more.
4) Masks, good hygiene, and other behavioral changes may make a difference
Besides staying at home, other behavioral changes could be putting a dent in Covid-19 spread as well. Compared to just several months ago, Americans are more likely to wash their hands, avoid touching their faces, wear a mask, and keep at least 6 feet from each other. They’re also probably less likely to go out when they do feel sick.
We don’t know how much all of these things are helping, but experts suspect that these practices are reducing how much transmission happens when people do go out.
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Consider masks. Just a few months ago, the idea that many Americans would go out with one was unthinkable. Today, polls show that the great majority of Americans are wearing masks sometimes if not always when they go out.
The research on masks isn’t great, but there’s some suggestive evidence: As long as people actually wear the masks and use them properly, studies indicate that they have some effect in reducing disease transmission overall. Some experts hypothesize — and preliminary research suggests — that masks have played a significant role in containing Covid-19 outbreaks in several Asian countries where their use is widespread, like South Korea and Japan.
Experts say they wouldn’t be surprised if masks play a bigger role than previously expected. As we’ve learned more about the coronavirus, we’ve gotten more and more evidence that it spreads through respiratory droplets. A mask quite literally stops those respiratory droplets.
nd that’s only one of the things people have changed. From no longer shaking hands to appreciating the power of soap more, we have done a lot to make sure this virus doesn’t spread as easily as it did when we first learned of it.
This applies not just to individuals but to institutions too — workplaces, restaurants, public services, and so on. “Companies are also increasingly taking responsibility for making sure their workforce stays safe,” MacDonald said.