Over 14,000 new jobless claims were filed in New Hampshire last week

The number of initial unemployment claims in New Hampshire is going down, but they are still grim.

Some 14,374 people filed for unemployment benefits in the week ending April 24, a little more than 6,000 fewer than the previous week, according to statistics released by the U.S. Department of Labor Thursday morning.

All told, that adds up to nearly 160,000 unemployment claims filed in the six weeks the pandemic-related recession struck in mid-March. That doesn’t mean all of those people are receiving benefits. Some may have not gotten them yet, others may have been denied, and still others might have been called back to work or found other jobs.

The previous week, for instance, when a cumulative 145,000 claims had been filed, 107,000 actually collected benefits.

Nationally, 3.8 million new claims were filed, down from 4.4 million the previous week, brining the total to 30 million, or about 18% of the nation’s workforce, since mid-March.