Making sense of job declines in relation to COVID cases and restrictions

There are many data points that help to tell the story of the coronavirus pandemic. This week, we were particularly interested in what LinkUp data tells us about how states job counts are changing amid the pandemic, and whether there is a relationship between job counts at the state level and the number of confirmed COVID cases per county.

As we examined the change in active job listings from March to April across the U.S., we found that the number of diagnosed coronavirus cases in a location doesn’t seem to be directly impacting the change in active job listings. Instead, what we see is more of a general downturn – as long as there are a large number of cases in the country, the markets in each state tend to be down a relatively similar amount.

We also took a look at a recent article ranking states by level of COVID-19 restrictions. One might assume that job decline would be most significant in the states that have implemented the most aggressive measures to limit virus exposure, but we actually found that on average job listing decline is nearly equal between the 10 most restrictive states and the 10 least restrictive states.

As more cases of COVID-19 are diagnosed and as restrictions are lifted, it will be interesting to see how job counts continue to change as well – whether it continues as a country-wide downward trend, or if we begin to see more a direct effect on job listings in states and counties most impacted.

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