by EngagingData
I wanted to provide better context for the magnitude of unemployment claims (30 million) in the last few weeks due to the shutdowns and social distancing measures to respond to the coronavirus pandemic. It is literally equivalent to every single worker losing their jobs in a number of states (depending on which states you look at). 27 if you choose the least populated states, and 3 if you choose the most populated states.
Just for context the entire state of New York is estimated to have around 9.5 million people in the civilian labor force as of Feb 2020 (i.e .all employed civilians and all people who are receiving unemployment).
Here is a link to the original interactive map: engaging-data.com/unemployment-covid-19-pandemic/?maptype=most
Sources and Tools:
Data on unemployment was obtained from the US Department of Labor website and labor force numbers by state are downloaded from the Bureau of Labor statistics. And the visualization was created using javascript and the open source leaflet javascript mapping library.