Extra unemployment funding on the way

Louisiana will receive its initial award of enhanced unemployment benefits by the end of this week, and checks will begin going out to those eligible at an unspecified time next week, Gov. John Bel Edwards reported in his COVID-19 press conference Tuesday.
Edwards said the state will receive $375 million in funding in the initial round, and the federal benefits will be $300 per week in addition to state unemployment benefits eligible citizens already receive.
While about 417,000 will be eligible for the program, Edwards said there are about 87,000 more in limbo of not getting the additional funding because of the way the U.S. Department of Labor is interpreting President Donald Trump’s executive order extending the benefits.
Of that number are 67,000 who earned less than $100 in weekly benefits and won’t be eligible for the payments, Edwards said. The remaining approximately 20,000 workers consist of those who initially said their unemployment was not due to COVID-19.
“Their continued separation may be, but those individuals are going to have to apply again,” Edwards said of that group of 20,000 workers, explaining they may become eligible.
The funding, which will be distributed through the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Disaster Relief Fund, will be retroactive to Aug. 1. The current federal funding through the Coronavirus Aid Relief and Economic Security Act expired July 31.
Edwards said he couldn’t give a specific day the payments will begin being distributed.
However, he noted it is important for Congress to work on a long-term solution to enhanced unemployment benefits that will last through the end of the year, because he said the current funding the state will receive only will last for about six weeks.
Edwards said the state’s unemployment insurance trust fund balance has dropped to $210 million. Once it falls below $100 million, which is predicted to happen in September, Edwards said the state probably will have to borrow money from the U.S. Treasury to keep the program afloat.
If Congress passes another funding package similar to what was done in the CARES Act, then the state may be able to avoid charging businesses a surcharge to repay this federal loan.
In other news, Edwards reported that statewide, there were 644 new cases of COVID-19 in the last 24 hours.
“That’s encouraging,” he said. “I mean there was obviously a time when 644 new cases were considered to be a really high number, but if you go back over the past several weeks, you know this represents continued progress.”
More good news was in the fact that the number of those hospitalized in the state has dropped to 1,204 patients, although those on ventilators has increased a bit.
“The good news here is the number of patients in our hospitals with COVID-19 is 25% less than it was two weeks after the most recent change in the mitigation and restrictions that we’ve imposed,” Edwards said of his mandate that limited bars’ service, required masks and decreased the amount of people who could assemble in social gatherings. “Those decreases have been sustained and relatively modest.”
Edwards noted that just after the measure was instituted, the state had 1,600 hospitalizations.
“That has taken a lot of the strain off of our hospitals that continue to have a lack of capacity in many of them,” he said.
Not all news was good, though, as Edwards reported Louisiana has the fifth-highest COVID-19 incident rate among all states involving new cases during the last seven days and is No. 1 in cases per capita.
“The case growth rate is an indication that we still have a lot of work to do,” he said.