Unemployment shoots to 20.2 percent in April

The state’s jobless rate has skyrocketed during the coronavirus pandemic.

Jay County has been hit harder than many.

The local unemployment rate for April came in at 20.2 percent, the 19th-highest rate in Indiana.

That number is up from just 3.2 percent in February when the county posted the 36th-lowest rate in the state. (The local rate was measured at 3.3 percent in March, but the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics survey that is used to determine the rates came early in the month before the pandemic took its toll.)

Among the handful of counties that fared even worse than Jay County was Adams County, which saw its rate soar to 20.7 percent in April up from 3.1 percent in February. Others that previously ranked among the lower rates in the state and are now among the highest include Elkhart, Noble, LaGrange, Decatur, Scott, Jackson and DeKalb counties.

Unemployment began a consistent downward trend following the peak of the Great Recession, with Jay County’s rate staying at 3 percent or lower every month from May 2019 through December 2019. Its increase of 0.7 percentage points in January was the largest since 2013. That mark was obliterated in April as the rate skyrocketed by 16.9 percentage points.

Daviess County showed the lowest unemployment rate in Indiana in April, coming in at 8.4 percent.

(The highest rate in the state during the previous month was 5.6 percent in Crawford County.) Martin County (8.8 percent) and Boone County (9.1 percent) were the only other counties in the state to stay below 10 percent unemployment in April.

Howard County had by far the highest rate in the state at 34.1 percent with more than a third of its workforce jobless. Elkhart County was next at 29.3 percent, followed by LaGrange County at 28.8 percent and Noble County at 28.7 percent.

Area rates are as follows:

Adams County: 20.7 percent, up 17.6 percentage points, t-15th highest.

Blackford County: 22.5 percent, up 18.2 percentage points, 11th highest.

Delaware County: 16.5 percent, up 12.5 percentage points, t-39th lowest.

Jay County: 20.2 percent, up 16.9 percentage points, 19th highest.

Randolph County: 17.8 percent, up 13.6 percentage points, t-41st highest.

Wells County: 16.6 percent, up 13.6 percentage points, t-41st lowest.

The department of workforce development released the state-level numbers Friday, showing Indiana’s unemployment rate was 16.9 percent in April. About 546,000 people in Indiana were unemployed in April, more than five times as many as a month earlier, and the state had the fifth-highest unemployment rate in the nation, according to federal statistics released Friday.

The hardest-hit sectors were leisure and hospitality, with 116,000 job losses, and manufacturing, which lost about 78,000 jobs.

Indiana's 16.9 percent unemployment rate easily surpassed its previous high of 12.6 percent in 1982. The national unemployment rate for April was 14.7 percent.

State workforce development commissioner Fred Payne said Friday that the state is processing fewer ongoing unemployment benefits claims and that more factories were resuming operations.

“Those employers have informed us that they are ramping back up at full strength,” Payne said.

Indiana’s unemployment level was better than Michigan’s 22.7% but slightly higher than in Ohio (16.8%), Illinois (15.4%) and Kentucky (15.4%).

“We do see some signs, but it is going to take some time to get out of this,” Payne said.