WYOMING — Unemployment rates have risen across the United States in response to the COVID-19 Coronavirus pandemic. Wyoming has been no exception to the unemployment plague sweeping the country.

The Tax Foundation, who claims to be “the nation’s leading independent tax policy nonprofit,” provided some insight about how prepared states are to pay out unemployment insurance claims.

Should Wyoming’s federal trust fund become insolvent, the state-level trust fund would kick in to pay for unemployment insurance benefits to claimants.

Based upon the 2020 state trust fund solvency levels and initial and continuing claims as of April 4, 2020, Wyoming is projected to have the ability to pay out unemployment insurance claims for 321 weeks — the longest of any state in the U.S.. Florida comes in as the second most prepared state, being able to cover claims for 90 weeks.

Only six sates in the country are projected to have the funds necessary to cover their projected claims.

In comparison, California faces a serious problem as the state can only cover four weeks of current claims. New York follows with five weeks.

Tax Foundation claims that “the estimate is generous.” The data does not include the last two weeks and only accounts data before April 4, 2020. However, the projections do add some perspective for Wyomingites. The numbers suggest that the state is prepared for this increase in claims, literally years ahead of most of the nation.

In another report, Tax Foundation crunched the numbers of unemployment insurance claims to compare current trends to that of the Great Recession.

Click on the dropdown menu and select “Wyoming” to view the state’s numbers:

The latest Wyoming unemployment rate was 3.7 in February. The highest Wyoming unemployment rate ever recorded was in December of 1986 when the unemployment rate reached 9.4.

Robin Cooley, Director of the Wyoming Department of Workforce Services, said that the number of unemployment claims have increased tri-fold since the pandemic hit Wyoming, and some days have increased eight-fold.

She added that the majority of the claims are coming from people who have never filed a claim before, and that makes the claims more difficult to manage as they need more assistance because they don’t know the process.

There’s no doubt that the longer the COVID-19 Coronavirus pandemic lasts, unemployment statistics will continue to change — dramatically.

As for Wyoming, it’s a relief to see in some ways we are prepared for those changes.